Leadership and School Quality

reviewed by Thomas L. Alsbury — February 02, 2016

Title: Leadership and School Quality
Author(s): Michael Dipaola, Wayne K. Hoy (Eds.)
Publisher: Information Age Publishing, Charlotte
ISBN: 1681230380, Pages: 254, Year: 2015
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Michael F. DiPaola and Wayne K. Hoy’s edited book Leadership and School Quality is one volume in a series titled Research and Theory in Educational Administration. This volume provides an important update on studies regarding the impact of school-level leadership on teacher performance and student achievement. It is unique in providing strategies for practicing school leaders, and suggestions for improving and refocusing curricular content in principal preparation programs.

The studies in this volume are important to researchers and practitioners at several levels. They provide substantive contributions to the field of educational administration; the findings answer a series of pressing questions regarding whether school leaders impact student performance. Opponents often argue that district-level and even school-level leaders are too far removed from students to influence performance. Many studies in this volume focus on the influence leaders have on teacher quality, and demonstrate a clear correlation between leadership and teacher performance. They move beyond more typical research designs that attempt to determine the impact of leadership through a correlation to student test scores. This approach is most clearly seen in chapters discussing leadership effects on organizational citizenship and teacher practices, such as teacher trust or classroom friction. This volume provides fodder for the continued legitimacy of investigating the characteristics of leadership that have an indirect but significant influence on student improvement.

In addition to providing additional research to this area of literature, many of the studies that are included provide guidelines for preparing future school leaders. For example, Chapter Two highlights the lack of attention paid by principal preparation programs to assessment leadership. Chapter Three argues that organizational citizenship is more important in predicting school success than school climate or servant leadership. Chapter Five addresses the importance of training district leaders in creating vertical support systems for principals and teachers in their districts. Finally, Chapters Nine, Ten, and Eleven focus on the importance of teacher trust for student performance. These findings should lead to revision or enhancement of current curricular content in principal and superintendent preparation programs.

The volume also reframes leadership practice in occasionally dramatic ways that are different than what is popular in the field. For example, conditions for highly effective schools have tended to emphasize changes in both organizational structure and school culture. However, these changes are typically driven by what some might call more rational and measurable leader actions. Leaders have been encouraged, through studying the importance of instructional leadership, to develop and implement more effective and measurable teacher evaluation systems or more collaborative decision-making processes.

The focus on structural or rational approaches to improving leadership is a trend seen over the past few decades. These shifts have been buoyed by research that seems to swing toward standardization and nominal or best practice. Several studies in this volume seem to swing the pendulum back in a direction supported by proponents of the human relations movement that values and promotes leadership practice focused on the affective domain. This shift can be seen by Hoy’s appeal in Chapter One to rethink how principals lead through a rebalancing of collaborative decision-making with nudging, comprehensive thinking, concurrent thinking, and optimizing with satisficing to name a few.

This shift in leadership focus is two-fold. First, recommendations on leading are more pragmatic, and incorporate the realities of the current school environment and external demands on school leaders. In today’s high-stakes accountability environment, principals are expected to make quick decisions and are held personally responsible for improvements in student test scores. Hoy departs from the previously popular, but unrealistic, recommendations for school leaders to further broaden teacher autonomy and individual initiative; he instead calls for leaders to use their influence through nudging or channeling. He also embraces satisficing over optimizing as a more realistic expectation in decision-making.

Second, the studies included seem to move away from the popular focus on standardizing curricular content and attempting to teacher-proof instructional strategy. The studies in this volume return to emphasizing human agency and the importance of relationship development as a driver for school improvement. School leaders are encouraged to promote social and emotional learning in the classroom (Chapter Four), and establish support networks for principals (Chapter Six). Leaders are also encouraged to increase organizational citizenship (Chapters Three, Six, Eight), which is described as voluntary efforts by teachers to offer work outside contractual requirements to better the school. Cultivation of teacher trust and collegiality (Chapter Nine), peer trust (Chapter Ten), teacher trust in parents and students (Chapter Eleven), and expressive support by principals (Chapter Seven) are promoted as effective leader practice.

Overall, this volume directs school leaders back to affective and relational techniques, and encourages a balance with standardized practice focusing on efficiencies. This theme of balancing efficiency and control with creative ambiguity and collective initiative is capped by the final chapter that speaks to recent federal mandates and grant incentives driving changes in school policy involving teacher evaluation, charter schools, and using the Common Core curriculum. The Race To The Top (RTTT) grant notably pushes leaders away from relational, affective, and contextual leadership techniques, and reinforces standardization and common practice for the purpose of better assessment and control of teacher quality. This chapter raises doubts on whether these mandates are sustainable and if they actually achieve their goals of improving education for the neediest students.

This volume provides current and future leaders with research to support what they most likely already know from practice—leadership practice must contend with uncontrollable and rapidly changing contextual variability, demands for quick decision-making, and the need to use relationships to drive change. The volume responds to what school leaders have learned in the past few decades regarding school change, and provides a more realistic and humanistic approach to effective leadership. Leadership best practice shifts away from mandated and standardized change approaches focused on efficiencies that ignore the need to balance the realities and benefits of both context and human agency.

Leadership and School Quality offers a glimpse into a new and more balanced approach to school leadership. The benefit of this volume to future leaders is encapsulated in Hoy’s call in Chapter One for the need to balance paradoxes that represent the reality of current school leadership practice. Leaders must balance thinking using concurrent thinking to “preserve the benefit of both quick and comprehensive thinking while avoiding the pitfalls of both” (p. 6). They must balance decision-making between open, free form, collaborative approaches that increase creativity and teacher autonomy, and the need for leaders to nudge, prompt, channel, and frame teachers to narrow information and solution options.

The need to balance stability and change, planning and initiative, unity and diversity, consistency and ambiguity, and control and autonomy provides a more realistic view of what present day school leaders face. This volume provides specific techniques, programs, and processes for school leaders that reflect a more balanced approach to school leadership. This includes seven principles for school leaders (Chapter One), the use of the Responsive Classroom approach (Chapter Four), training using the School University Research Network (SURN) (Chapter Five), and setting up principal support networks (Chapter Six). This volume also provides a number of evaluation tools that can be used to measure school or leader effectiveness including the Principal Support Scale (Chapter Seven), Hoy’s School Effectiveness Index (Chapter Eight), and the Index of Perceived Organizational Effectiveness (IPOE) (Chapter Nine).

Overall, Leadership and School Quality would serve as an excellent supplemental reading for school leadership preparation program courses, and is well suited for currently practicing principals and teachers. Due to the fact that this book addresses many leader practices that are principal-teacher partnerships by design, the volume would be an excellent choice as a book study for developing leadership teams.