The Wallace Foundation finds after ten years of research that the leadership principals provide to schools is the second most important factor directly impacting student performance, after only teacher performance.
According to a new report prepared by the Wallace Foundation, “a national philanthropy that seeks to improve education and enrichment for disadvantaged children”, the reason that principals play such a large role is the fact that they are at the nexus of many different factors and have the ability to put a positive stamp on each.
Over the past ten years, the Wallace Foundation has funded projects in 28 states and many other specific districts and issued over 70 research reports concerning school leadership. They have boiled down their findings into five key practices of effective principals:
- Shaping a vision of academic success for all students.
- Creating a climate hospitable to education.
- Cultivating leadership in others.
- Improving instruction.
- Managing people, data and processes to foster school improvement.
The full report, which can be found here (and at the link below), provides elaboration on each. Another particularly salient finding, separately confirmed by researchers at the universities of Minnesota and Toronto, concerns the direct connection between principal performance and student achievement:
“Drawing on both detailed case studies and large-scale quantitative analysis, the research shows that most school variables, considered separately, have at most small effects on learning. The real payoff comes when individual variables combine to reach critical mass. Creating the conditions under which that can occur is the job of the principal. Indeed, leadership is second only to classroom instruction among school-related factors that affect student learning in school.”
Findings about the effects of principals will be followed up with a Wallace Perspective series focusing on “school leadership and how it is best developed and supported.” Subsequent publications will delve into “the role of school districts, states and principal training programs in building good school leadership.”
For more information, please visit:
http://www.wallacefoundation.org/Pages/default.aspx
