“CEO Louis Gerstner added $40 billion to IBM’s stock market value.” “By himself?”

Linking Educational Leadership to Student Achievement

2008 IES Conference

Anthony MilanowskiWisconsin Center for Education Research

University of Wisconsin-Madison

1. Linkage Questions • Are there substantial leader effects on

student achievement outcomes?• What are the sources of leader effects?

(which behaviors, skills are important)• What can educational organizations do to:

– select & develop leaders who will carry out the behaviors?

– manage the organizational environment to support them in doing so?

2. Some Major Challenges to Linking Leadership to Outcomes• Indirect nature of effects• Equifinality and contingency of leader

behaviors• Non-separability of many leader behaviors• Much of leadership is symbolic &

inspirational rather than directly instrumental • Unknown time lag between leader behavior

& effects on student achievement

3. Comments on Papers• Supovitz & Sirinides

– Plausible sources of effect drawn from literature: mission & goals, community & trust, focus on instruction

– Recognition of “distributed leadership” perspective– Explicit comparison of relative effects of two sources

of influence: effects of principal & peers on instructional change

– Takes study of indirect effects a step farther by adding a new & potentially important path: principal effects on other instructional leaders

• Supovitz & Sirinides– Common method bias

– Change in instruction problematic to measure• Accuracy of teacher self-reports (recall Quint

presentation and many others) • Uncertain change metric

– Unclear to me why communication amongst peers is the most influential teacher characteristic related to change in practice

– Seems counterintuitive to claim a principal effect on change in student achievement when no variance in student achievement change at school level

• Harris & Sass– Illustrates another type of indirect principal

effect• Evaluation of teachers by principals could be used to

improve instruction and through instruction, achievement

• But are more higher rated teachers the ones who are better at facilitating student learning?

– Rather surprisingly, principal’s overall ratings were about as good as past value-added in predicting achievement gains

• Harris & Sass– Potential generalizability concern: rating

for consequences should be more lenient and have less spread weaker relationship with achievement

– How big does rating-achievement relationship need to be? (r= .1 - .2)

– Need to take this line of work further• Which teaching behaviors matter?

• Can principals validly assess them?

• Quint (full half)– Pursues important indirect effects at two levels

• District involvement in PD for principals• Principle involvement in PD for teachers

– Takes theory of action seriously• Theory of action & its implementation key in

understanding source of leader effects• Attention to operationalizing theory of action

– Commendable caution

• Quint (empty half)– Seriously limited by small n

– Less than ideal control for prior achievement

– Need a better way to summarize the numbers

• How relevant is statistical significance?

• Which links are stronger? My take:principal PD receipt involvement w/ teacher PD =.27

principal involvement teacher receipt =.16

teacher receipt to instructional quality =.10

instructional quality with student achievement =.30

– Inconclusive or suggestive?

4. What designs might be used to make additional progress?• Longitudinal cross-case qualitative studies with

purposive sampling of contexts• Specify what leaders need to do to support

instructional strategies, then test effect of leader on strategy implementation, and of strategy on achievement

• Measure principal competencies and assign at random to schools, tracking direct & indirect results over time (Witziers, Bosker, and Kruger, 2003)