Poster #106 - Principal Effects on Teacher Working Conditions

• In Event: Friday Poster Reception

Abstract

Research on school principals highlights their role in shaping teachers’ work environments, but most evidence is qualitative or correlational. We provide plausibly causal estimates of how principals affect a broad swath of teacher working conditions using data from Illinois, where the State Board of Education collects detailed and comprehensive information annually on teacher working conditions in nearly all schools. We estimate the variance of principal effects by comparing correlations in working conditions over time in schools that do and do not experience principal changes. Under plausible stationarity assumptions, differences in these correlations can be used to recover the variance of principal effects, unconfounded by dynamic school-level factors. Unsurprisingly, we find that principals have large effects on working conditions directly related to leadership. A one-standard-deviation improvement in principal quality corresponds to improvements in teacher-principal trust (climate-oriented) and instructional leadership (process-oriented) of approximately 0.66 and 0.45 school-level standard deviations, respectively. Principals also affect broader aspects of teacher working conditions, but to a lesser degree. We estimate moderate effects on teachers’ professional work environments (0.19 standard deviations) and smaller effects on teachers’ interactions with students and families (0.13 standard deviations).  In all cases, the principal effects emerge immediately when a transition occurs. These substantive results are broadly robust to reasonable modifications to our estimation sample and methodology.The magnitudes of our estimates seemingly exceed the most credible estimates of the variance of principal effects reported in the test-score literature, but the differences are smaller than they initially appear. This is because test-score studies scale principal effects in student-level standard deviation units, whereas our estimates are expressed in school-level units. After adjusting for this difference, our estimates imply principals have effects on teachers’ interactions with students and families that are similar in magnitude to their test-score effects. Their effects on the professional work environment are somewhat larger, and their effects on leadership-specific aspects of working conditions are much larger.Our findings contribute to our understanding of how school principals shape teachers’ work environments. To the best of our knowledge, our finding that school leaders have larger effects on climate-oriented dimensions compared to process-oriented dimensions of leadership is new, both in the causal literature on principals and in management research more broadly. In addition, our results highlight climate-oriented aspects of leadership as a potentially important lever for improving teachers’ work environments, which is consistent with descriptive evidence emphasized by teacher policy and advocacy organizations.Principal effects on non-leadership-specific working conditions are less pronounced, and whether they are large or small is in the eye of the beholder. Our view is that our estimates imply the scope for principal effects is large enough for principal-based interventions to improve teacher working conditions, though there are limits on what we can expect. Most of the variance in non-leadership-specific working conditions is attributable to factors other than principals, and principal effects are smallest on working conditions related to teachers’ interactions with students and families, which recent research show have seen the greatest decline since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Ataur Rahaman, University of Missouri-Columbia
  Presenting Author