Improving School Leadership: The Promise of Cohesive Leadership System. Monograph

RAND Corporation. P.O. Box 2138, Santa Monica, CA 90407-2138. Tel: 877-584-8642; Tel: 310-451-7002; Fax: 412-802-4981; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.rand.org

N

178

Wallace Foundation

Leadership Effectiveness; Instructional Leadership; Principals; Teaching Methods; Grants; Educational Administration; Educational Policy; State School District Relationship; Correlation; Educational Indicators; Surveys; Educational Change

Delaware; Georgia; Illinois; Indiana; Iowa; Kentucky; Massachusetts; Missouri; Oregon; Rhode Island

978-0-8330-4891-2

Improving the nation's public schools is one of the highest priorities of federal, state, and local government in America. Recent research has shown that the quality of the principal is, among school-based factors, second only to the quality of the teacher in contributing to what students learn in the classroom. The Wallace Foundation, which has focused its grantmaking in education primarily on school leadership, has long recognized the need for more-coordinated state and district policies in this area. This study had three objectives: (1) To document the actions taken by Wallace Foundation grantees to create a more cohesive set of policies and initiatives to improve instructional leadership in schools; (2) To describe how states and districts have worked together to forge more-cohesive policies and initiatives around school leadership; and (3) To examine the hypothesis that more-cohesive systems do in fact improve school leadership. The study found that it is possible to build more-cohesive leadership systems and that such efforts appear to be a promising approach to developing school leaders engaged in improving instruction. Although the authors could not provide evidence that the full underlying theory behind the Wallace initiative is sound, they did find a correlation between improved conditions for principals and their engagement in instructional practices. Six appendices are included: (1) Background Information on Study States and Districts; (2) Indicators of Leadership Policy Initiatives, Factors of Cohesion, Conditions, and Effective Leadership Practices; (3) Principal Survey Technical Notes; (4) Principal End-of-Day-Log Technical Notes; (5) Index Construction for the Analyses in Chapter Eight; and (6) Methodology and Elaborated Results for Analyses in Chapter Eight. (Contains 2 figures, 59 tables and 18 footnotes.) [This report was produced by RAND Education and commissioned by The Wallace Foundation. For the Wallace Foundation "Research In Brief" on this report, see ED508309.]

ERIC

68

2010

ED508313