# Presentation: 218837

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

**Linking Educational Leadership to Student Achievement**
**2008 IES Conference**
**Anthony Milanowski**
**Wisconsin 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)