Jonathan Supovitz

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.

Capturing the Cumulative Effects of School Reform: An 11-Year Study of the Impacts of America’s Choice on Student Achievement:

This article presents the results of an 11-year longitudinal study of the impact of America’s Choice comprehensive school reform (CSR) design on student learning gains in Rochester, New York. A quasi-experimental interrupted time-series approach using Bayesian hierarchical growth curve analysis with crossed random effects is used to compare the annual gains in test performance of students attending America’s Choice schools to those of students attending other Rochester schools and to those of students attending America’s Choice schools before they adopted this CSR model. Findings reveal significant annual effects, which accumulate over time, in elementary and middle grades reading and mathematics.

Melding Internal and External Support for School Improvement: How the District Role Changes When Working Closely With External Instructional Support Providers

To support instruction, school districts must provide a wide array of assistance to schools. Broadly speaking, districts play the roles of authority in holding schools accountable for their activities and performance, support in assisting school faculties to build their capacity to better instruct students, and brokerage between schools and outside providers of service and materials. The roles of authority, support, and brokerage typically contend with each other, producing a set of perennial tensions for district leaders. This article examines the influence on these three roles of external support providers working in close partnership with districts on instructional improvement efforts. First, the article reviews the literature on district/provider partnerships for examples of role adjustment. Second, using a case study of a deep partnership between a district and an external provider, this article empirically examines the influence of a district/provider partnership on the balance of district roles. The findings illustrate how the traditional district roles of authority, support, and brokerage are adjusted by partnerships with external providers.

Surveying through cyberspace

This article describes an evaluator’s experience constructing a World Wide Web site to collect evaluation data. Data collection via the Web presents a series of technical and design challenges. Eight lessons surrounding Web site development, including site design, data management, data presentation, and computer platform considerations are discussed. The article concludes that Web-based data collection has several possible advantages over paper-and-pencil forms and is a promising method that does not compromise data quality.

From the Inside In: Common Core Knowledge and Communication Within Schools

Developing instructional capacity in schools is a central challenge of the Common Core movement. Most conceptualizations of capacity building focus on infusing externally generated professional development into schools. In this article, we explore the professional resources that reside inside schools that might be utilized to develop instructional capacity from within. Overall, we found that an abundance of these resources existed in schools, but they were unevenly distributed across and within schools. We also found that coaches and administrators were more likely to be recipients for requests for assistance and that they tended to have more Common Core subject matter knowledge, on average, than teachers did. We also found that external resource seeking was correlated with Common Core knowledge and with those who were recipients of requests for advice from colleagues. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for research and practice.

Twitter gets favorited in the education debate

The author describes how the interactive study of social media’s effect on the Common Core debate was designed and executed. Important findings from the study were: 1) We live in an increasingly interconnected social world. 2) Media has evolved over the last half century from a passive system dominated by a few central opinion makers to the present -- a more active phase of social media in which we are the media. 3) A new activist public of social media entrepreneurs are now jockeying with more traditional advocacy groups for attention in the political space in which policy ideas incubate and public opinion emerges. All three of these are new phenomena that continue to rapidly change as new technologies influence the ways in which we learn, communicate, and interact.

Teacher Leaders' Work with Peers in a Quasi-Formal Teacher Leadership Model.

ABSTRACT Building on evolving conceptions of teacher leadership in the literature, this article argues that an integration of both positional and empowering elements of teacher leadership are the seeds of an evolved approach to teacher leadership for instructional improvement. Using data from a study of quasi-formal teacher leadership, the research examines how teacher leaders play a positive role in schools and fulfil a series of needs of teachers. However, the constraints of teacher leaders’ instructional authority limits their ability to influence the instructional practices of their peers. The findings clarify the distinction between school-level and individual-level teacher leadership.

Interest Group Activity in the Context of Common Core Implementation

This article analyzes the messages and strategies of a sample of education interest groups, and assesses their interpretations of the political context to understand how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) lost both political and public support during the crucial period of 2013-2014. Based on interviews with representatives of 19 interest groups who were actively involved in communicating about the standards, it focuses on the arguments, communication strategies, and targeted audiences of professional advocacy groups, policy membership organizations, and testing organizations. Our findings identify six themes that contributed to the climate of increased partisanship and politicization, and helped shape perceptions about the Common Core, both within the education sector and among the broader public. We argue that these policy factors, strategic factors, and contextual factors played an important role in shaping the environment within which the CCSS were being understood and implemented.

The Linking Study: An Experiment to Strengthen Teachers’ Engagement with Data on Teaching and Learning

In a randomized controlled trial of a teacher data-use intervention, the Linking Study tested the impacts of a cyclical and collaborative process that linked teachers’ data on instructional practice with data on their students’ learning. This article describes the theory of the intervention and its roots in the literature as a backdrop for an intervention with 64 teachers in 27 professional learning communities and their students. The researchers found moderate and significant effects on external judgments of the quality of instruction caused by the intervention and small and marginally significant impacts on student performance on end-of-unit tests. There were no effects on teachers’ perceptions of the importance of data or their self-reported proficiency using data. The article concludes with a discussion of the ways that data-use interventions might be strengthened to support instructional improvement and student learning.

Social Media Is the New Player in the Politics of Education.

Political debate about the Common Core State Standards (the first major education policy initiative in the social media age) ramped up quickly on social media, particularly on Twitter. However, while the increased and intense conversation influenced many states to disavow Common Core in name, those states ended up adopting standards that were essentially the same. More important, the author argues, the Twitter-based conflict over Common Core served as a proxy war for other concerns and revealed lasting changes in the nature of political advocacy in education.