To best train and support school leaders in their evolving roles, they require high-quality preparation and in-service pipelines that both address the changing demands on their positions and acknowledge the cascading effects that well-prepared leaders have on both student outcomes and in school culture and retention. Including school leaders in…

Weighted student funding (WSF) decentralizes control over resources and empowers principals as financial leaders of their schools. In this study, we set out to understand how principals are making use of those leadership opportunities. Based upon a 2017-18 survey of 639 principals in 14 school districts implementing WSF, we find that principals…

Increasingly, states and districts are combining student growth measures with rigorous, rubric-aligned teacher observations in constructing teacher evaluation measures. Although the student growth or value-added components of these measures have received much research and policy attention, the results of this study suggest that the data generated…

To improve the quality of instruction and the achievement of all students, effective school leaders develop capacity, advocate, and create support systems for professional learning. Creating a team of teachers to share leadership, responsibility, and accountability for achieving collective goals is essential. This was the task of a first-time…

This article describes a teacher-led school "Mathematics and Science Leadership Academy" (MSLA) that is part of the Denver Public Schools. At MSLA, teachers collaborate to make authentic and substantive decisions about how the school operates and seek to meet each student's needs. At teacher-led schools, teachers hire their own…

Leadership matters. Principals are the primary drivers of school improvement and the best long-term investment to ensure effective teaching and learning at scale. Principals are central to State efforts to implement new college and career-ready standards, execute teacher evaluation and support systems and turn around low-performing schools. These…

This quantitative study investigated the relationship between teacher dispositions, subject content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and reasons that school principals recommend non-renewal of teachers' contracts. Nearly 2,000 school principals in 13 states completed an emailed survey. In deciding whether to non-renew a teacher contract,…

The author's purpose for this article is to examine the use of the Response to Intervention (RtI) framework to meet the needs of a continuum of learners, from those who most struggle to those in need of advanced educational opportunities. Through classroom observations, teacher interviews, and dialogue with the site-based Problem-Solving Team,…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to analyze how high school principals approached developing a collaborative culture and providing collaborative leadership in a large high school setting. The population sample for this study was 82 principals of large comprehensive high schools of grades 9 through 12 or some combination thereof with…

As an outgrowth of the accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act, districts are increasingly implementing "interim" or "benchmark" assessments. This report investigates various stakeholders' original purposes in adopting interim or benchmark assessments, ensuing implementation efforts, and actual assessment…

An effective school requires an effective leader, but great principals rarely just happen. They are cultivated. This Wallace Perspective draws on a decade of foundation research and work in school leadership to show how urban school districts can play a major role in ensuring they have principals who can boost teaching and learning in troubled…

This study examined differences in nine factors between a group of the highest-performing needs high schools (HPHN) and a group of the lowest performing high-needs (LPHN) high schools using teacher responses from a national dataset. The factors are: (1) shared mission and goals; (2) professional development; (3) collaboration among teachers (4)…