Equity Under Constraint: Principal Supervisor Differentiation and Principals' Response

• In Event: Principal Supervisors as Drivers of School Improvement: Where Have We Been? What's Next?

Abstract

Principal supervisor differentiation of supports for principals has been identified as a key lever in deepening principals’ professional work (Honig, 2012). Supervisor differentiation also facilitates equitable school improvement by targeting intensive support toward schools with the greatest needs. Consequently, differentiation has become a common aspirational feature of the new principal supervisor role. For instance, the Model Principal Supervisor Professional Standards recommends that supervisors differentiate learning opportunities, support, and feedback to principals (CCSSO, 2015). However, little is known about how principal supervisors engage in the complex task of differentiation with diverse groups of principals, particularly given the organizational constraints and time demands faced by supervisors in urban districts.

In this paper, I, a member of the PSI evaluation team, explore whether and how supervisors in an urban district differentiated support for their principals in their daily work by addressing the following questions:
1. How do principal supervisors interpret district expectations for differentiated support?
2. What principal and school-related criteria do principals use to differentiate their support?
3. How do principals experience differentiated support from supervisors?

Drawing upon the theory of recoupling (see Hallett, 2010), I position the increased focus of the principal supervisor role on supporting principal instructional leadership as a device for creating tighter links between state and district accountability policy and the work of schools. Simultaneously, supervisors’ work with principals may facilitate the central office’s shift toward becoming more learning-centric, or aware of and responsive to principal and school needs (Johnson & Chrispeels, 2010).

Using a convergent mixed methods design (Creswell, 2007), I leverage four waves of principal surveys (491 principal-by-year observations) in a single district across the 2016-17 and 2017-18 school years and 31 interviews with central office leaders, principal supervisors, and principals conducted in Spring 2018. Surveys and interviews asked participants to describe specific principal supervisor practices and criteria for differentiation. Surveys and interview instruments were based on those used in the implementation study of the Wallace Principal Supervisor Initiative (see Goldring et al., 2018), although the study district was not a part of the initiative.

The district expected principal supervisors to assign each principal to one of three “tiers” of support based on diagnosed need. Although all supervisors reported that they differentiated support, quantitative analysis of survey data found few links between principal supervisor practices and principal characteristics. Interviews suggested that supervisors relied on holistic and subjective diagnoses of principal needs to determine how to tier supports for principals, and that supervisors were also organizationally constrained in their ability to differentiate supports. Finally, the majority of principals reported that they believed supervisors tailored support to their needs. Principals who had less frequent contact with their supervisors were more likely to describe support as generic but also believed infrequent contact signaled their high performance. They therefore hesitated to ask for additional supports.

Findings highlight the practical successes and challenges districts face in implementing differentiated support, a commonly accepted best practice of principal supervision.

Author

• Laura K. Rogers, University of Utah