Impact of School Leaders
While there has been considerable anecdotal discussion about the importance of school leaders, there has been very little systematic research into the impact of them on student outcomes. Recent analysis in the United States has provided evidence by looking at how the gains in student achievement for a school change after the principal changes. This outcome-based approach to measuring effectiveness of principals is very similar to the value-added modeling that has been applied to the evaluation of teachers. When done for principals in the state of Texas, it is found that principals have a very large impact on student achievement. Effective school leaders have been shown to significantly improve the performance of all students in a school, at least in part through their impacts on selecting and retaining good teachers. Ineffective principals, however, have a similarly large negative effect on school performance, suggesting that issues of evaluation are as important with respect to school leadership as they are for teachers.
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Famous quotes containing the words impact of, impact, school and/or leaders:
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“Too many existing classrooms for young children have this overriding goal: To get the children ready for first grade. This goal is unworthy. It is hurtful. This goal has had the most distorting impact on five-year-olds. It causes kindergartens to be merely the handmaidens of first grade.... Kindergarten teachers cannot look at their own children and plan for their present needs as five-year-olds.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Children in home-school conflict situations often receive a double message from their parents: “The school is the hope for your future, listen, be good and learn” and “the school is your enemy. . . .” Children who receive the “school is the enemy” message often go after the enemy—act up, undermine the teacher, undermine the school program, or otherwise exercise their veto power.”
—James P. Comer (20th century)
“The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.”
—Ashley Montagu (b. 1905)