Teacher leadership at different school levels: findings and implications from the 2003–04 Schools and Staffing Survey in US public schools

Abstract

Research on teacher leadership has been dominated by small-scale qualitative studies. Little has been known about the level of teacher leadership in practice in US public schools and little has been known how teacher leadership practices are related to different school contexts. Analysing nationally representative data from the 2003–04 Schools and Staffing Survey, we enquired into the level of teacher leadership and compared it at elementary and secondary school levels. We first conducted descriptive statistics to investigate US public school teachers’ perceptions about their leadership involvement in the areas of classroom operation and school operation. Then we performed discriminant function analysis to determine whether there were areas that could reliably distinguish teachers’ perceptions about teacher leadership at different school levels. We found that teacher leadership was still confined at the classroom level, that secondary school teachers reported having a higher level of leadership in the curriculum- and instruction-related areas than their elementary counterparts, and that even in the curriculum-related areas, the level of teacher leadership was still substantially low.