School Leadership in Middle and Low-Income Countries

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Wednesday IV)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Leadership and decision making in improving school quality

Proposal

Around the world, there is need for dramatic improvement in the education systems, particularly for students from low-income communities. Less than 30% of students in sub-Saharan Africa can read at grade level, and less than 50% of Indian students in grade 5 can read a grade 2 text. These systems together serve almost half a billion students and indicate the massive magnitude of the education gap.

Research on the importance of school leadership suggests it could be a key lever in transforming education systems. After studying headmasters in India and abroad, Stanford University Professor Nick Bloom and his colleagues write that a one point increase on their scoring of school management practices is associated with a ten percent increase in student performance. McKinsey’s global review cites that a school principal – just one person – accounts for twenty-five percent of the impact that schools have on student learning. Furthermore, leading education economist Eric Hanushek and his colleagues show evidence that suggests the ability of the principal matters most in schools serving the most underprivileged students.

Yet most countries do not have strong systems to support principals. A 2015 UNESCO report states that school leadership development is lacking in the developing world leading to poor student outcomes. A 2015 OECD report on Indonesia states, “Student outcomes in Indonesia are still relatively poor, and evidence suggests that the quality of teaching and the quality of school leadership are the main reason for student’s low performance.” Research in Kenya, Ghana, and India has found that school leaders receive inadequate training for their role.

Global School Leaders aims to change this by developing models for improving school leadership in middle and low-income countries. Our first training program began with six schools in India in 2013, and in 2018 has grown to serve more than 1400 schools across 5 states. Our continuous professional development model addresses the pressing need to raise the effectiveness of school leaders in the short term. We are developing leadership training models that are practitioner-focused with a combination of theory and practice and contextualized to the specific country’s situation. The programs are designed to rapidly scale after initial pilots and for this they need to be low cost, especially in the absence of significant government funding for leadership development.

Our internal data has shown that leaders in program improve the quality of leadership which has resulted in improving teaching practice. This has led to gains in student learning done by third-party assessors. Students in schools that are a part of the program saw the percentage of students who score above the grade-level average on third-party assessment in English increased from twenty-four percent to thirty-five percent. In Mathematics, the percentage of students above the grade-level average increased from twenty-four percent to forty-one percent. More rigorous impact evaluation is being done to see what of these gains can be wholly attributed to the leadership program.

In addition to the work in India, GSL support school leadership development programs in Kenya, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Author

• Sameer Sampat, None