Exploring School Principals’ Leadership Styles and Learners’ Educational Performance: A Perspective from High- and Low-Performing Schools

School leadership is fundamental to the educational functioning of schools and their improvements of results. The study employed a qualitative approach to explore school principals’ leadership styles and the educational performance of learners in high- and low-performing schools in Vhembe District, Limpopo, South Africa. The participants were purposefully selected from 10 secondary schools in terms of their performance. Focus group interviews were conducted with five teachers from each school. The interview data was transcribed and analysed, and identical patterns of coded data were grouped together under emerging themes. The overall results of the study indicated that the democratic leadership style together with the transformational leadership style contribute to high educational performance of learners. School principals from high- and low-performing schools employ a democratic leadership style and differ only in the sense that the latter are permissive or lenient towards learners’ behaviours or conduct. The study recommends that school principals engage teachers as members of a disciplinary committee in order to deal with those learners whose conduct is not conducive to successful teaching and learning. It is recommended that school principals from low-performing schools strengthen their democratic leadership by not being lenient to learners’ behaviour which is not conducive to successful teaching and learning.     

Planning for school turnaround in the United States: an analysis of the quality of principal-developed quick wins

Research suggests that high-quality school improvement planning reflective of the school’s needs and objectives is central to a principal’s success in leading a school. Some American scholars contend that successfully planned and executed “quick wins” are critically important to launching high-level organizational change processes necessary to turn around low-performing schools. Yet, lack of research suggests that the concept of quick wins may be built more on assumptions than evidence. In this study, we evaluate formal quick wins as planned by school principals participating in a turnaround leadership program in the United States. Our results suggest that principals struggle to develop high-quality quick wins despite their relative simplicity as an improvement planning starting point, especially in comparison with the development of traditional annual improvement or development plans. Finally, we consider the implications of these results in relation to traditional school improvement planning, especially in response to low-performing school contexts.     

Factors affecting the performance of public schools in Lebanon

By sampling extreme cases (five high-performing schools and five low-performing ones), the researcher revealed the differences in the teachers’ motivation (Mattar, 2010) as well as the extent to which Principals adopted the instructional leadership style (Mattar, 2012) in the two sets of schools. Here, she looked for additional issues, within the same sample, that make a school a high-achieving one or a low-performing one. Factors affecting school performance are: students’ SES and their quality, teachers’ quality (their ability and the quality of work life) and the way they are motivated, the Principal's leadership style, and the schools’ physical working conditions.     

再谈薄弱学校成因

薄弱学校问题既是一个教育问题，也是一个社会问题。它不是由单一因素形成的，而是由教育不均衡发展政策造成教育资源配置不平衡、义务教育统一目标下教育资源投入不足、分级办学管理体制下所产生的投资差异、公民的教育投资意识导致校际差距加大、教育评价制度的缺失以及薄弱学校自身的原因等多种因素综合作用的结果。     

教育精准扶贫背景下轮岗教师专业引领之困境及其化解

轮岗教师专业引领指凭借轮岗教师的专业领导力,引领帮扶学校教育理念、课程教学以及教育科研的变革,以促进帮扶学校教师专业发展,培育帮扶学校内生性发展力量,实现薄弱学校精准脱贫。这与旨在从根源上帮助贫困对象脱贫并阻断贫困代际传递的教育精准扶贫理念相契合。然而,在教育实践中,轮岗教师专业引领却遭遇了轮岗教师观念失衡与专业引领胜任力不足,帮扶学校支持性环境与内生性力量缺失,管理部门信息交流平台缺失与制度性保障不到位的困境。化解轮岗教师专业引领困境,需要关注轮岗教师能力精进和角色认同,重建帮扶学校自我变革的主体角色,完善政策导引与制度设计,精准推进轮岗扶贫实践。     

Changing roles in sustaining successful charter school leadership in high poverty schools: Voices from the field

Effective educational leadership is essential for the success of schools and ultimately student achievement. The impact of school leadership may be even more pronounced in charter schools. Due to current and unprecedented growth, unique design, and complexities of political, financial, and governance issues they face, there is a need for more highly qualified charter school leaders and perhaps even “differently” prepared leaders. In this qualitative study, the authors documented the characteristics and skills of two successful, sustained charter school leaders who retrospectively described their evolved and evolving roles over twenty five years. Each transformed high-poverty, low-performing schools with at-risk populations and led with vision, passion, and a relentless desire to positively influence their organizations and ultimately improve student success in their communities. Although many of their skills and characteristics fall within existing theories, such as situational leadership, transformational leadership, and distributive leadership, they embodied a level of dedication and commitment to the original communities in which they founded charters lasting over a quarter of a century. The findings suggest that founding a charter school and seeing it through to success over time may more closely resemble missionary work than traditional school leadership.     

Toward an understanding of how teachers change during school reform: Considerations for educational leadership and school improvement

As the concept of distributed leadership and its concomitant organizational structures become more prevalent in schools, studying how teacher capacity can be enhanced and can be used as a catalyst for reform is important. This article documents the nature of how the implementation of a research-validated reform influenced what teachers thought about their own teaching, student achievement, and expectations. A case study approach documented the experiences of elementary school teachers in a high poverty, historically low-performing elementary school as they implemented a researched-validated instructional reform targeting the most at-risk students in the school. The teachers experienced significant professional growth that encompassed self-doubt, resistance, acceptance, and finally advocacy. Implications for the practices that define educational leadership and school improvement are discussed in light of how successful reform can improve teacher capacity.     

Turnaround Policy and Practice: A Case Study of Turning Around a Failing School with English-Language-Learners

In an era of school reform and high stakes accountability, the major challenge in education is to turnaround the nation’s lowest-performing schools. National policy provides abundant resources with often restrictive prerequisites. Research indicates that quality principals and teachers are the most important factors for turning around the lowest performing schools; however there is little research in how to turnaround failing schools with high enrollments of students in poverty, who are English-Language Learners, and who are Hispanic. The purpose of this study is to understand how demography, policy and practices affect the educational edge of students in poverty, who are English-Language Learners, and who are Hispanic. How do the practices of a school leader who is professionally/culturally/linguistically responsive affect turnaround for a failing schools? How does the personal and professional background of a Latino principal affect student performance in a failing school? This research conducted a qualitative case study to include principal interviews, principal observations, teacher interviews, and the use of state and school archival data. Analyses included organizing data into data themes and triangulating data themes, using principal background, principal professional/cultural beliefs and practices, school context, teacher data, and archival data. Conclusions confirm the need to conduct research to document and define the performances for professionally/culturally/linguistically responsive principal models and their effect on student performance in historically failing schools. In addition, policymakers need to consider the organizational contexts of professional/culturally/linguistically responsive leadership and teaching models as turnaround school models.     

Overlooking the descent: Operational definition,identification, and description of school decline

Educators, researchers, politicians, and the media have committed considerable time, attention, and effort to chronically low-performing schools. Although many have chided the schools for their unacceptable performance or designed strategies to improve them, few have sought to understand how these schools became chronically low-performing in the first place. Better knowledge of how schools decline into chronic low-performance will allow interested stakeholders to potentially prevent and turnaround chronically low-performing schools. However, before understanding the factors and processes associated with or contributing to school decline, researchers must first properly define and identify the process. This paper offers four operational definitions of school decline, applies those definitions to a population of schools, and evaluates the utility of each definition.     

Distributed leadership: challenging five generally held assumptions

This article reports on a study exploring a distributed perspective on school leadership through three head teacher case studies conducted in Scottish primary schools. Drawing from a sequence of in-depth, semi-structured and narrative style interviews conducted with each head teacher, as well as from a semi-structured questionnaire and sociometric analysis conducted with staff, the article analyses the experiences and the perceptions of head teachers. The paper finds that in practice, distributed leadership is more complex and challenging than often represented, challenging five generally held assumptions in the theoretical, policy and practice frames. Implications are drawn for educational leadership at both school and system levels.     

The efficacy of small internal networks for improving schools

Through two school case studies in Cyprus, in this paper I explore the role of small internal collaborative networks in promoting school improvement. The analysis of the two cases revealed a series of interrelated themes which indicated issues related to school improvement, and actually, it provided evidence that small internal collaborative networks could contribute to school improvement. This contribution was related to the development of interest in the learning of children coming from vulnerable groups, to the creation of conditions for more effective leadership and management within the schools, and to changes in the culture of the schools.     

Stealth marketisation: how international school policy is quietly challenging education systems in Asia

Across Asia, the international school scene has experienced marketisation and corporatisation. A consequence is that many wealthier families – outside of expatriate communities – view international schools as a desirable choice, and they seek ways to enrol their children in international schools. States have responded to this situation through policies that manage the boundaries between public or national school systems and international schools. States have made compromises in their international school policies – compromises that allow markets to creep into the broader education systems. This mode of market creation is subtle: Neither families nor state agents advocate for ‘choice’ as a value, nor are there public discourses around international schools in the region celebrating ‘choice’ in education. The compromises made in international school policy relate to whole education systems and have implications for inequality, citizenship, and national identity.     

Principal leadership practices in exploiting situated possibilities to build teacher capacity for change

This paper attempts to identify leadership practices of school principals as they engaged in exploring and exploiting possibilities in and around the school contexts to build teacher capacity for change. Based on interview data of school principals, this paper shows that principals from different schools engaged in qualitatively different practices when they led their schools in building teacher capacity for school improvement. Three approaches to teacher development are identified, namely deficit approach, interactive-growth approach and participatory-growth approach, each delineating a unique set of teacher capacity building practices, teacher learning activities and contextual conditions in which they occur. Implications for developing efficacious principal leadership in teacher capacity building are discussed.     

‘Closing the gap’: systems leadership is no leadership at all without a moral compass – a Scottish perspective

This conceptual paper provides a critical analysis of the current convergence of major policy initiatives in Scotland to improve learning and teaching, promote greater equity and close the attainment gap through systems level leadership and change. It is neither an empirical study nor a literature review but synthesises across a range of fields – social justice, poverty, social mobility, school improvement, leadership and policy – in order to cast light on the problem and to inform public policy and practice. However system level leadership is not unproblematic, with, as argued by Boylan, the terms system and leadership seen as malleable concepts, nor can it be seen as a panacea for all ills. The paper argues that educational policy needs to be seen as residing within wider social policy. Without recourse to addressing systemic inequalities in society and building the infrastructure and support structures around schools, schools, on their own, are unlikely to rise to the challenge. The paper argues for a melding of distributive leadership (with emancipatory intent and purpose) with systems leadership, characterised by meaningful collaboration and partnerships from ‘within – to between – and beyond’ schools (as suggested by Chapman), imbued with moral purpose.     

‘I’m just a numbers person’: the complexity,nature and effects of the quantification of education

This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the research explores the complex ways in which numbers came to constitute and dominate the practices in this school site under a broader national, state and regional policy context demanding rapid improvements in various forms of standardised tests and associated practices. Specifically, the research reveals a strong and simultaneous focus by teachers upon a variety of numeric data collected at national, regional and local levels, and intricate relations between these data; multiple visualisation, triangulation and comparison approaches towards such data in virtual and physical formats; and the enumerative nominalisation of both students and their reading attainment in relation to specific, concretised levels of achievement and various types of scale scores. The research cautions against the sheer volume of such enumerative practices, which, while productive of teachers’ understandings of student capacity against standardised measures of achievement, may also lead to a more reductive view of education, dominated by concerns about achievement in standardised tests (and associated practices) alone.     

Teacher Evaluation, Leadership and Learning Organizations

This article presents the argument that meaningful teacher evaluation in schools can be an important catalyst for organizational learning and school improvement when it is linked to broader conceptions of leadership in schools. A state-of-the-art teacher evaluation, assessment and professional growth system is described and the manner in which this system is linked to leadership density, organizational learning, and school improvement is detailed. Findings from two contrasting case studies of schools implementing this new system are presented and implications of the findings for linking teacher evaluation systems, newer conceptions of school leadership, and school improvement are described.     

State Education Agencies’ Acquisition and Use of Research Knowledge for School Improvement

Over the last two decades, state education agencies (SEAs) have been given considerable responsibilities for improving low-performing schools and for adopting research-based practices in doing so. Yet we know little about how and where these organizations search for, select, and use research and other kinds of evidence. We examined these questions as they relate to school improvement designs and strategies in three SEAs using a combination of surveys and interviews conducted in 2010–11. We found that SEA staffs relied most heavily on their colleagues for information but that information often flowed across departments and offices, contrary to the usual image of the SEA as a segmented and siloed bureaucracy. A large number of external organizations were identified in SEA research advice networks and played a catalyzing role in the design or elaboration of research for policy. Although most sources were named by just one person, each SEA also had central internal staff who played an important role in brokering research on school improvement. Identifying and cultivating such influential actors, and connecting individuals who are now isolated or only weakly engaged in these communication networks, could create a more robust exchange of knowledge around school improvement.     

Professionalizing school governance: the disciplinary effects of school autonomy and inspection on the changing role of school governors

Since the 1980s, state schools in England have been required to ensure transparency and accountability through the use of indicators and templates derived from the private sector and, more recently, globally circulating discourses of ‘good governance’ (an appeal to professional standards, technical expertise, and performance evaluation as mechanisms for improving public service delivery). The rise of academies and free schools (‘state-funded independent schools’) has increased demand for good governance, notably as a means by which to discipline schools, in particular school governors – those tasked with the legal responsibility of holding senior leadership to account for the financial and educational performance of schools. A condition and effect of school autonomy, therefore, is increased monitoring and surveillance of all school governing bodies. In this paper, I demonstrate how these twin processes combine to produce a new modality of state power and intervention; a dominant or organizing principle by which government steer the performance of governors through disciplinary tools of professionalization and inspection, with the aim of achieving the ‘control of control’. To explain these trends, I explore how various established and emerging school governing bodies are (re)constituting themselves to meet demands for good governance.     

Inclusive school leadership: Examining the experiences of Canadian school principals in supporting students with special education needs

As school systems strive to support students with special education needs in inclusive schools, there has been a persistent lack of scholarly literature that addresses the ways in which school principals are engaged in this process. This article is a response to this gap and aims to examine the question: What types of experiences do school principals identify as formational in their support of students with special education needs and fostering inclusive schools? Based on the analysis of data collected from 285 school principals from six provinces in Canada, four key themes are identified including: relationships, modelling behaviours, communication and principal isolation and lack of preparation. These themes are examined with consideration for how to support principals’ professional leadership in fostering inclusive schools. As a result, this article’s significance is in its examination of the experiences of principals and how these influence their leadership practice for supporting students with special education needs and fostering inclusive schools.