Henry May

The Scope of Principal Efforts to Improve Instruction.

Researchers have used many angles and perspectives to investigate how principals enact instructional leadership in schools. Most research has emphasized the practices of school leaders, although investigations of leadership styles and leadership processes are also present in the literature. In this study, the authors take a different approach by examining the scope of principal efforts to improve instruction. Scope of principal effort refers to the extent to which principals target or distribute their instructionally oriented work with teachers. Using data from principal web logs and teacher surveys conducted in 51 schools in an urban southeastern district, the authors develop models to examine not only differences in average instructional change at the school level but also variability in instructional change across teachers within schools. The results indicate that the scope of principals’ instructional leadership activities varies from one school to the next, from very broad approaches that target the entire faculty to very targeted approaches that focus on a few teachers, and that the frequency of a principal’s instructional leadership activities with an individual teacher is directly related to the magnitude of instructional changes reported by that teacher. These findings support the notion that principals who focus on the improvement of particular teachers in conjunction with broader approaches can produce greater changes in instructional practice.

The Magnitude, Destinations, and Determinants of Mathematics and Science Teacher Turnover

This study examines the magnitude, destinations, and determinants of mathematics and science teacher turnover. The data are from the nationally representative Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Follow-Up Survey. Over the past two decades, rates of mathematics and science teacher turnover have increased but, contrary to conventional wisdom, have not been consistently different than those of other teachers. Also, contrary to conventional wisdom, mathematics and science teachers were also no more likely than other teachers to take noneducation jobs, such as in technological fields or to be working for private business or industry. The data also show there are large school-to-school differences in mathematics and science turnover; high-poverty, high-minority, and urban public schools have among the highest rates. In the case of cross-school migration, the data show there is an annual asymmetric reshuffling of a significant portion of the mathematics and science teaching force from poor to not-poor schools, from high-minority to low-minority schools, and from urban to suburban schools. A number of key organizational characteristics and conditions of schools accounted for these school differences. The strongest factor for mathematics teachers was the degree of individual classroom autonomy held by teachers. Net of other factors such as salaries, schools with less classroom autonomy lose math teachers at a far higher rate than other teachers. In contrast, for science teachers salary was the strongest factor, while classroom autonomy was not strongly related to their turnover.

Developing a Psychometrically Sound Assessment of School Leadership: The VAL-ED as a Case Study

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, documented psychometric properties. To address this need, a team of researchers in principal leadership, assessment development, and psychometrics developed the Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education (VAL-ED). The purpose here is to report on iterative development work where the instrument was tested and revised across several cycles. Future work to investigate the instrument’s psychometric properties is identified. After an extensive item writing and instrument development phase, the authors embarked on a series of studies designed to guide improvements to the instrument. These studies include a sorting study, two rounds of cognitive interviews, a bias review, and two rounds of small- scale pilot tests. Results and implications from each study are discussed. The iterative development process helped improve the clarity of instructions and items while building a growing collection of preliminary validity and reliability evidence. At the end of the development process, the VAL-ED represents a promising instrument for assessing principal instructional leadership.The VAL- ED also represents a tool for possible use by principal leadership researchers in measuring the effectiveness of school principals.

Year One Results From the Multisite Randomized Evaluation of the i3 Scale-Up of Reading Recovery

Reading Recovery (RR) is a short-term, one-to-one intervention designed to help the lowest achieving readers in first grade. This article presents first-year results from the multisite randomized controlled trial (RCT) and implementation study under the

A Policy Analysis of the Federal Growth Model Pilot Program's Measures of School Performance: The Florida Case

55 million Investing in Innovation (i3) Scale-Up Project. For the 2011–2012 school year, the estimated standardized effect of RR on students’ Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) Total Reading Scores was .69 standard deviations relative to the population of struggling readers eligible for RR under the i3 scale-up and .47 standard deviations relative to the nationwide population of all first graders. School-level implementation of RR was, in most respects, faithful to the RR Standards and Guidelines, and the intensive training provided to new RR teachers was viewed as critical to successful implementation.

Unequal Access to Rigorous High School Curricula: An Exploration of the Opportunity to Benefit From the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP)

As test-based educational accountability has moved to the forefront of national and state education policy, so has the desire for better measures of school performance. No Child Left Behinds (NCLB) status and safe harbor measures have been criticized for being unfair and unreliable, respectively. In response to such criticism, in 2005 the federal government announced the Growth Model Pilot Program, which permits states to use projection models (a type of growth model) in their accountability systems. This article uses historical longitudinal data from a large school district to empirically show the inaccuracy of one states projection model, to demonstrate how projection models are very similar to NCLBs original status measure, and to contrast projection models with value-added models. As policy makers debate the reauthorization of NCLB, this research can provide guidance on ways to improve the current measurement of school performance.

An Examination of the Benefits, Limitations, and Challenges of Conducting Randomized Experiments With Principals

This study explores whether students from low-income families and racial/ethnic minority groups have the opportunity to benefit in what is arguably the most rigorous type of credit-based transition program: the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IBDP). The analyses first describe national longitudinal trends in characteristics of schools offering the IBDP and the characteristics of students within schools who enroll. The analyses draw on data from the International Baccalaureate database, which include individual-level data on more than 400,000 IBDP students from 1995 through 2009, as well as data from the Common Core of Data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The article also draws on data collected from a survey of IBDPs in Florida to document variations in the opportunity to benefit from available IBDPs.

Rethinking Connections Between Research and Practice in Education: A Conceptual Framework:

Purpose: The past decade has seen considerable debate about how to best evaluate the efficacy of educational improvement initiatives, and members of the educational leadership research community have entered the debate with great energy. Throughout this debate, the use of randomized experiments has been a particularly contentious subject. This study examines the potential benefits, limitations, and challenges involved in using experiments to evaluate professional development for principals. Approach: We present a case study of an experimental evaluation of a professional development program for principals. The case study is grounded in key themes in recent debates about the use of experiments in educational research, scholarship on challenges in conducting experiments, and experimental studies involving principals. Setting and Sample: The case study was conducted in an urban school district with 48 principals. Implications for Research: The experimental component of the study allowed us to form a trustworthy summary inference about whether or not a professional development program had an overall effect on principals. However, the experiment did not illuminate why or how the program failed to influence principal practice. Using descriptions of the intended curriculum for principals, professional development attendance records, and interview data, we developed an understanding of why the program failed to achieve its intended goals. Based on our experiences, we support continued advocacy of research designs that bring rich evidence to bear about causal mechanisms, implementation conditions, potential measures of delivery of and adherence to treatment protocols, and measures of participants’ exposure to treatment.

The Impacts of Reading Recovery at Scale: Results From the 4-Year i3 External Evaluation:

Recent efforts to improve the quality and availability of scientific research in education, coupled with increased expectations for the use of research in practice, demand new ways of thinking about connections between research and practice. The conceptual framework presented in this paper argues that increasing research in educational decision-making cannot be simplified to an issue of dissemination or of motivating practitioners to access evidence-based research but rather is a bidirectional problem in which characteristics of both the research and practice communities must be understood and addressed in order to strengthen ties between research and practice in education.

Pairing Animal Cartoon Characters With Produce Stimulates Selection Among Child Zoo Visitors

Reading Recovery is an example of a widely used early literacy intervention for struggling first-grade readers, with a research base demonstrating evidence of impact. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s i3 program, researchers conducted a 4-year evaluation of the national scale-up of Reading Recovery. The evaluation included an implementation study and a multisite randomized controlled trial with 6,888 participating students in 1,222 schools. The goal of this study was to understand whether the impacts identified in prior rigorous studies of Reading Recovery could be replicated in the context of a national scale-up. The findings of this study reaffirm prior evidence of Reading Recovery’s immediate impacts on student literacy and support the feasibility of successfully scaling up an effective intervention.