NEPC Resources on School Administration and School Administrator Issues
NEPC Review: Remote Learning Is Here to Stay: Results from the First American School District Panel Survey (RAND Corporation, December 2020)
The RAND Corporation released a report based on a national survey of school district superintendents and charter management organization directors about their experiences navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey asks non-biased questions about how school districts and charter schools have responded to the pandemic and about their greatest educational needs. But some issues arise with the report’s reporting of results and with one of its two recommendations. The report’s first recommendation does follow from the respondents’ need for more funding to address inequities and socio-emotional learning. But the other recommendation, for more funding to support remote learning, does not appear to align with needs expressed by district leaders. The report also combines two different types of local education agencies (school districts and CMOs), so it is unclear how much of the resulting answers are driven by each type. Readers are encouraged to go beyond the title and read deeper to get a complete picture of the challenges, needs, and future of education from district leaders’ perspectives.
NEPC Review: Unlocking Potential: How Political Skill Can Maximize Superintendent Effectiveness (Center on Reinventing Public Education, January 2018)
This report offers political advice to school superintendents. The authors draw solely on a collection of anecdotes from superintendents of large urban districts to offer a narrative replete with maxims, aphorisms, and pithy advice. Superintending is, in their view, a continuous string of almost unavoidable conflicts, so the reader is led through internal groups (central office, school board, unions, teachers and principals) and external groups (foundations, businesses and state politicians) and advised on how to cultivate support and deal with opponents. There is no research design, literature review, or systematic data collection. The report relies heavily on the authors’ experiences, yet neither author appears to have worked in a K-12 district or served as a superintendent. Moreover, the advice that follows is often contrary to contemporary professional practices. The report improperly generalizes from more politicized large urban districts and does not consider how the favored approaches may limit vision, flexibility and effectiveness. In the end, the report perpetuates antiquated methods and does not advance our knowledge.
NEPC Review: Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, June 2014)
These two reports focus on the need for more effective principals to improve school quality. Each includes a sensible discussion of workplace conditions affecting the principal pipeline and contributing to leadership effectiveness. Great Principals at Scale recommends better school and district alignment of goals and strategies, along with district-provided support structures and greater local autonomy for principals. Lacking Leaders examines the hiring practices in five school districts and identifies ineffective hiring practices as contributing to a pipeline problem; it argues that attracting the best candidates will require additional remuneration, greater autonomy over staffing decisions, and increased district-level collaboration. The headline policy recommendation is to increase salaries $100,000 above current levels to attract more effective principals into the pipeline. No research in the report, however, justifies the size of the salary recommendation or demonstrates salary as the most important factor influencing principal recruitment, selection, or retention. Also, while both reports focus on the principal as the primary source of leadership in schools, neither considers other important sources of leadership. Both reports suggest leadership and management skills found in many organizational settings outside of education are easily or directly transferable to education. This suggestion, however, underestimates the human context of teaching and learning. These and other limitations undermine the usefulness of the reports’ resulting recommendations.
NEPC Review: The School Staffing Surge: Decades of Employment Growth in America’s Public Schools, Part II (Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, February 2013)
The School Staffing Surge, Part II is a companion report to a 2012 report called The School Staffing Surge. The earlier report argued that between 1992 and 2009, the number of full-time-equivalent school employees grew 2.3 times faster than the increase in students over the same period. It also claimed that despite these staffing increases, there was no progress on test scores or drop-out reductions. The new report disaggregates the trends in K-12 hiring for individual states and responds to some of the criticisms leveled at the original report. Yet this new report, like the original, fails to acknowledge that achievement scores and dropout rates have steadily improved. What it does instead is present ratios comparing the number of administrators and other non-teaching staff to the number of teachers or students, none of which has been shown to bear any meaningful relationship to student achievement. Neither the old report nor this new one explores the causes and consequences of employment growth. When a snapshot of hiring numbers is not benchmarked against the needs and realities of each state, it cannot illuminate the usefulness or wastefulness of hiring. The new companion report, much like the original one, is devoid of any important policy implications.
Review of Two Articles on Principal Effects
Two articles by the same authors estimate the effects of principals on student achievement. Both report school-level, value-added Texas state test results for school principals, controlling for gender, race, free and reduced-price lunch, and earlier academic performance. They find large to small effect sizes depending on the model examined. The study is severely limited by methodological issues, including the age of the data (12-18 years old) and failure to account for several variables: experience as a principal, the effectiveness of comparison principals, district assignment policies, nonlinear effects of principals on schools, other influences on high-poverty schools, and non-principal influenced teacher mobility. Regarding principal mobility, the authors failed to account for district policies and career mobility patterns. Finally, the authors could not estimate the effects of first-year principals. These flaws raise serious questions about the actual effect sizes of principals on student test scores and thus the validity of the analyses. The report is most useful for methodological discussions about value-added estimates for principals, the validity of different models, and principal effects on teacher and principal turnover. The most important policy-relevant conclusion that can be derived from this report is that estimating principal effectiveness is simply not possible given current methodology and sample size restrictions. Thus, such estimates should not be used to evaluate principals.
Review of The School Staffing Surge
The School Staffing Surge finds that between 1992 and 2009, the number of full-time equivalent school employees grew 2.3 times faster than the increase in students over the same period. The report claims that despite these staffing and related spending increases, there has been no progress on test scores or drop-out reductions. The solution, therefore, is school choice. However, the report fails to adequately address the fact that achievement scores and drop-out rates have actually improved. If the report had explored the causes and consequences of the faster employment growth, it could have made an important contribution. However, it does not do so. Unless we know the duties and responsibilities of the new employees, any assertion about the effects of hiring them is merely speculative. Further, the report’s recommendations are problematic in its uncritical presentation of school choice as a solution to financial and staffing increases. The report presents no evidence that school choice - whose record on improving educational outcomes and efficacy is mixed - will resolve this “problem.” The report's advocacy of private school vouchers and school choice seem even odder given that private schools have smaller class sizes and charter schools appear to allocate a substantially greater portion of their spending on administrative costs—two of the main policies attacked in the report.