A Rural Divide? Behaviors of Rural School Leaders in the United States and China

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 1:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Comparative Studies in Educational Leadership From Across the Globe (Table 14)

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the similarities and differences of rural principals in two industrialized nations, the U.S. and China. It also addresses the effect of rurality on the connection between principal practices and student outcomes in the two rural settings. Using the PISA 2015 datasets of the U.S. and China sample, we find that (1) Principal actions differ more between countries than they do between rural and non-rural locales within countries; (2) individual leadership actions broadly have little overall impact on achievement in rural schools cross-nationally; and (3) universally applicable “best practices” for rural principal leadership, at least as captured by the PISA principal leadership framework, do not exist.

Authors

• Andrew Pendola, Auburn University

• Huacong Liu, Shanghai Jiao Tong University