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

1. “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

2. 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?

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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?

8. 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

9. 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?

10. 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)