Rethinking Principal Effects

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Accepted wisdom suggests that organizational leaders contribute meaningfully to firm productivity. In the public sector, this is particularly true for schools where researchers and policy makers alike view principals as critical mechanisms by which to improve student outcomes. However, important methodological questions remain about how to best examine principals' contributions. We examine 13,000 principals' contributions to the outcomes of over 15 million students across the distinct contexts of Tennessee, Oregon and New York City. We show that standard principal value-added models do not produce meaningful measures of principal effectiveness. In fact, our results indicate that---although principals may play an important role in the professional environments of the teachers they supervise---they do not appear to produce important differences in student-test-score or attendance outcomes.

Author

• David Liebowitz, University of Oregon