"The Wiley Handbook of Educational Supervision" offers a comprehensive resource that explores the evolution of supervision through contributions from a panel of noted experts. The text explores a wealth of topics including recent and dramatic changes in the complex context of today's schools. This important resource: (1) Describes…

New Leaders is a nonprofit organization with a mission to ensure high academic achievement for all students by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. Its premise is that a combination of preparation and improved working conditions for principals, especially greater autonomy, would lead to improved student outcomes. Its…

New Leaders is dedicated to promoting student achievement by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. RAND Corporation researchers conducted a formative and summative external evaluation of the New Leaders program, its theory of action, and its implementation from 2006 through 2013. This document presents technical…

This report presents selected findings from the Public School Principal Status and Private School Principal Status Data Files of the 2012-13 Principal Follow-up Survey (PFS). The PFS is a nationally representative sample survey of public and private K-12 schools in the 50 states and District of Columbia and was initiated to inform discussions and…

The vital role of principalship in improving schools in general and enhancing student achievement in particular has been well documented. Given its importance, there is a need for tools to improve principalship, particularly ones emphasizing those dimensions associated with student achievement. Given the accountability movement, with its…

This paper presents the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd's 13th annual report on the status of the teaching profession in California, focusing on the role of the principal in supporting teaching quality. More specifically, the report discusses fiscal and policy trends, the competing demands of the principalship,…

Research has consistently shown that principal leadership matters for successful schools. Evaluating principals on the behaviors shown to improve student learning should be an important leverage point for raising leadership quality. Yet principals are often evaluated with the use of instruments with no theoretical background and little, if any,…

This field study profiles the roles of secondary school principals in Lebanon, focusing on four areas: (1) role-specific behaviors necessary for success; (2) the degrees of significance attached to each of the behaviors by principals, teachers, and students; (3) the extent to which such behaviors are actually found; and (4) the consequent picture…

Recent developments in cognitive anthropology, in particular the development of ethnographic semantics, make ethnographic methods more systematic. The goal is to replace intuition with an operationally explicit methodology for discerning how people construe their world of experience from the way they talk about it. The first part of this paper…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to examine (a) ways in which elementary principals in Connecticut influenced the induction experiences of new teachers and (b) how school leaders professional backgrounds and beliefs affected their approaches to induction. Research Methods: The study included six elementary principals from three Connecticut …

This document reports on a study undertaken to identify specific behaviors of secondary school principals that are effective or ineffective in promoting positive school characteristics. The researchers first searched the literature to find an organizational model that would take into account the organization's goals, the means for measuring…

This report presents results from an evaluation of a series of workshops on the role and function of the school principal, held in Alberta, Canada in 1983. The workshops were designed to assist school systems in defining the role and function of principals as a step toward developing policies for implementing changes related to the principalship.…

To explore the principal's role as instructional leader in school improvement strategies, this research brief focuses on characteristics of effective schools, a profile of effective principals, and a discussion with Dr. Steven Bossert, Associate Laboratory Director for Research and Development at Far West Laboratory in San Francisco, California,…

The South is part of a dramatic education reform movement championed by a group of progressive governors and motivated by a desire to improve the region's economic future by bettering the education of its work force. Most southern states have significantly raised certification standards, teacher salaries, and per pupil expenditure. Georgia's…

Survey responses from over half of Oklahoma City's 2,500 teachers indicated their views of the effectiveness and leadership of the city's 94 school principals. The survey's 82 items were selected from ideas suggested in the principal effectiveness literature and from the leadership component of Oklahoma City's prinipal evaluation forms. The…