Identifying and Predicting Effective Leader Practices: Examining Principal Experience and Prior Roles

ABSTRACT

The importance of leadership in schools is substantiated, and we know that effective leaders call upon certain practices to influence student achievement. What remains less clear is how the professional backgrounds of educators may influence effective leader practice. This study utilizes data from the Schools and Staffing Survey to first identify six latent constructs that broadly represent effective leader practices. Our findings include that years of experience as a teacher is more strongly correlated with effective leader practice than other types of experience. These findings are the first national estimates of this relationship.