Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore-Louis

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781118132265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Linking Leadership to Student Learning clearly shows how school leadership improves student achievement. The book is based on an ambitious five-year study on educational leadership that was sponsored by The Wallace Foundation. The authors studied 43 districts, across 9 states and 180 elementary, middle, and secondary schools. In this book, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, and their colleagues report on what they found. They examined leadership at each organizational level in the school system—classroom, school, district, community, and state. Their comprehensive approach to investigating school leadership offers a balanced understanding of how the structures within which leaders operate shape what they do. The results within will have significant implications for future policy and practice.

Praise for Linking Leadership to Student Learning

"Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis offer a seminal new contribution to the leadership field. They provide a rich and authoritative evidence base that demonstrates clearly just why school leadership is so important and how it promotes successful student learning." — PAMELA SAMMONS, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford

"This ambitious, groundbreaking, and thought provoking treatment of the link between school leadership and student learning is a testament to the outstanding work of these exemplary scholars. This is a 'must read' for academics and practitioners alike." — MARTHA McCARTHY, President's Professor, Loyola Marymount University, and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus, Indiana University

"The question is no longer whether school and district leader's impact student learning, but rather how they do it. The authors provide a convincing answer, one that recognizes the crucial interaction between leader and locality." — DANIEL L. DUKE, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Virginia

CHAPTER ONE

LEADERSHIP AND LEARNING

The Critical Connection

Education is widely held to be crucial for the survival and success of individuals and countries in the emerging global environment. U.S. politicians of all stripes have placed education at the center of their political platforms, and education has been at the center of many European and Asian policy agendas. Comparable agreement is also evident about the contributions of leadership to the implementation of virtually all initiatives aimed at improving student learning and the quality of schools. It is therefore difficult to imagine a focus for research with greater social justification than research about successful educational leadership. That was the broad focus for the five-year study on which this book is based, a study generously funded by the Wallace Foundation. We aimed to identify the nature of successful educational leadership and to better understand how such leadership can improve educational practices and student learning.

More specifically, we sought to do the following:

• Identify state, district, and school leadership practices that directly or indirectly foster the improvement of educational practices and student learning.
• Clarify how successful leadership practices directly and indirectly influence the quality of teaching and learning.
• Determine the extent to which individuals and groups at state, district, school, and classroom levels possess the will and skill required to improve student learning, and the extent to which their work settings allow and encourage them to act on those capacities and motivations.
• Describe the ways in which, and the success with which, individuals and groups at the state, district, school, and classroom levels help others to acquire the will and skill required to improve student learning.
• Identify the leadership and workplace characteristics of districts and schools that encourage the values, capacities, and use of practices that improve student learning.

The Educational Leadership Effect

Although leadership is widely thought to be a powerful force for school effectiveness, this popular belief needs to be justified by empirical evidence. There are five types of such evidence, each offering its own estimate of the size of leader effects.

One type is evidence from qualitative case studies. Studies providing this type of evidence typically are conducted in exceptional school settings, selected as exemplars of effectiveness.1 Some studies report large leadership effects—on student learning and on an array of school conditions. Other qualitative studies focus on “typical” schools rather than outliers; these studies often produce complex pictures of how leadership operates in different settings.2 Many educators and scholars find the descriptions provided by case studies to be interesting and informative. But descriptions of a small number of cases do not yield explanations of leadership effects for a more general population of schools.3

The second type of evidence has been derived from large-scale quantitative studies of leadership effects on schools and students. Evidence of this type, as reported and reviewed since about 1980,4 suggests that the direct and indirect effects of school leadership on student learning are small but significant. Leadership explains 5 to 7 percent of the variation in student learning across schools (not to be confused with the very large within-school effects that are likely). Five to 7 percent, however, represents about one quarter of the total across-school variation (12 to 20 percent) explained by all school-level variables, after controlling for student intake or background factors.5 Classroom factors explain more than a third of the variation. To date, research of this sort has done little to clarify how leaders achieve the effects in question, and the implications for leadership practice are therefore limited.

A third type of evidence arises from studies (also large-scale and quantitative) focused on the effects of specific leadership practices. Some evidence of this sort can be found in the research just summarized. But a meta-analysis conducted by Marzano, Waters, and McNulty (2003) extends our understanding of the explanatory potential of this type of research. Marzano et al. identify twenty-one leadership “responsibilities” (behaviors) and then calculate an average correlation between each responsibility and the measures of student learning used in the original studies. From these data they calculate estimated effects of the respective responsibilities on student test scores. For example: there would be a 10 percentile-point increase in student test scores resulting from the work of an average principal if she improved her “demonstrated abilities in all 21 responsibilities by one standard deviation” (p. 3). Extending this line of inquiry, Marzano and Waters (2007) provide a comparable analysis of research on district-level leadership, identifying five broad categories of superintendent leadership. Robinson, Lloyd, and Rowe (2008) have provided a more recent meta-analysis of evidence identifying specific school-level leadership practices along with estimates of their independent contributions to student learning. Robinson’s work may be distinguished from Marzano and colleagues in two ways: first, the quality screen used for inclusion in the analysis was more stringent; second, the purpose was to locate a smaller number of factors (five) that had the strongest evidence, across multiple studies, for achievement effects.

A fourth type of evidence has been provided by studies of leadership effects on student engagement, as distinct from effects on student learning; some evidence suggests that student engagement is a strong predictor of student learning.6 Recently, at least ten large-scale, quantitative studies, similar in design, have assessed the effects of leadership behavior on student engagement, and all have reported significant positive effects.7

Finally, a different but quite compelling sort of evidence about leadership effects comes from research on leadership succession. Unplanned principal succession, for example, is a common source of adverse effects on school performance, regardless of what teachers might do. Studies by Macmillan (2000) and Fink and Brayman (2006) demonstrate the devastating effects of rapid principal succession, especially on initiatives intended to increase student learning. And rapid succession is very common. Clearly, leadership matters.

In developing a starting point for this five-year study, we claimed, based on a preliminary review of research,8 that leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student learning. After five additional years of research, we are even more confident about this claim. To date we have not found a single documented case of a school improving its student achievement record in the absence of talented leadership. Why is leadership crucial? One explanation is that leaders have the potential to unleash latent capacities in organizations. Put somewhat differently: most school variables considered separately have only small effects on student learning.9 To obtain large effects, educators need to create synergy across the relevant variables. Among all the parents, teachers, and policy makers who work hard to improve education, educators in leadership positions are uniquely well positioned to ensure the necessary synergy.

Meanings of Leadership

Leadership can be described by reference to two core functions: providing direction and exercising influence. Whatever else leaders do, they provide direction and exercise influence. This does not imply oversimplification. Each of these two leadership functions can be carried out in different ways, and the various modes of practice linked to the functions distinguish many models of leadership.

In carrying out these two functions, leaders act in environments marked variously by stability and change. These conditions interact in complementary relationships, and while stability is often associated with resistance and maintenance of the status quo, it is in fact difficult for leaders and other educators to leap forward from a wobbly foundation. To be more precise, stability and improvement have a symbiotic relationship. Leaping forward from a wobbly foundation may well produce change, but not change of the sort that most of us value: falling flat on your face is the image that comes to mind. Wobbly foundations and unwise leaping may help to explain why the blizzard of changes adopted by our schools over the past half century has had little effect on the success of our students. School reform efforts have been most successful in schools that have needed them least.10 These have been schools with well-established processes and capacities in place, providing foundations on which to build—in contrast to the schools most often of concern to reformers, those that are short on essential infrastructure.

How do these concepts come together in a clarification of leadership? Leadership is all about organizational improvement. More specifically, it is about establishing agreed-upon and worthwhile directions for the organization in question and doing whatever it takes to prod and support people to move in those directions. Our general definition of leadership highlights these points. Leadership is about direction and influence. Stability is the goal of what is often called management. Improvement is the goal of leadership. But both are very important. One of the most serious threats to stability in a school district is frequent turnover in the ranks of superintendents, principals, and vice principals. Instability at the scho...