Principal Leadership and School Performance: An Examination of Instructional Leadership and Organizational Management

ABSTRACT

Recent research work in school leadership highlighting the importance of principals’ organizational management skills has prompted scholars to consider their importance in relation to instructional leadership skills. However, there is limited empirical work that directly compares these leadership skills and their importance for school outcomes. In this study, we use principals’ self-ratings to construct typologies of effectiveness in both domains and compare their relationship to student achievement. Our results show that principals view themselves as either strong or weak on instructional leadership and organizational management skills simultaneously. We also find that learning gains vary significantly across the principal profiles.

Notes

1. Measures of instructional leadership and organizational management used by Grissom and Loeb (2011) were designed to orthogonal (unrelated) to each other. Thus, their relationship to each other could not be studied.

2. We argue later that the debate between management and leadership effectiveness has been indirectly addressed in education research.

3. Studies on principal instructional leadership typically rely on teacher ratings of leadership; there is less research that examines principals’ own ratings (Urick & Bowers, 2014).

4. Alternative approaches would have been to conduct a latent profile analysis on the continuous indicators of instructional leadership and organizational management.

5. We examined the dependent variable distribution, variance homogeneity, and residual files to check assumptions underlying the HLM analysis; these results are available from the authors upon request.

6. The standard deviation in achievement across schools can be calculated from the Level 2 variance component in Model 0 (150.40). The difference in achievement for schools in the less- and least-effective leadership groups is at least 5.28 points, which is 43% of the standard deviation in achievement across schools, calculated as the square root of 150.40).

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant #R305A120706 to the University of Chicago. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the institute or the U.S. Department of Education.