Guest editorial

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International Journal of Educational Management

ISSN: 0951-354X

Article publication date: 18 January 2011

641

Citation

Pashiardis, P. and Brauckmann, S. (2011), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 25 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijem.2011.06025aaa.003

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Educational Management, Volume 25, Issue 1

This Special Issue of IJEM on “School leadership and its effects on student achievement” has multiple origins. The first of them was the publication of the first findings of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which coincided with the beginning of the new millennium and had a great theoretical and practical impact on studies on student achievement. The Programme for International Student Assessment, however, is important for yet another reason. Interestingly enough, one could observe that the unexpectedly “disappointing” results of a specific age cohort (15 years old) triggered strong debates among policymakers, scientists, practitioners and parents with regards to the performance of the overall educational system itself, and by doing so questioned the system’s underlying governance strategies and instruments. As a consequence, for instance in Germany, after the TIMSS (end of 1990s) and the PISA (2000) “shock” significant efforts have been undertaken to change the “steering” of the educational system. Thus, the PISA studies, building on school effectiveness research (SER), are considered to be one of the modern vehicles through which the causes behind the failings of the present educational system and the consequences of new structures and contents can be identified and analysed (see Husén, 1984, p. 23). Thereby, this kind of educational research is meant not only to become an essential prerequisite for educational reform, but is also intended for the steering and advising of social systems such as schools as being embedded in a multi-layered educational governance system. It is therefore not surprising that (especially) future PISA studies will not only be dealing with but also exploring further the dimension of school leadership (as a mediator and moderator variable for more effective governance strategies) and its relationship with student achievement as the main dependent variable for measuring not only “educational systems” but also their subsystems; in other words, the performance of the educational system as a collective institutional actor.

Second, in the field of educational research, the tradition of school effectiveness has had a history of expansion for more than 30 years now. Studies of the first wave of school effectiveness were carried out in the early 1970s, mainly in the USA and the UK. These studies were conducted as a reaction to the pessimistic findings of the congressionally mandated study that was carried out in the USA by James Coleman and his colleagues, known as the Coleman Report (1966). The original title of this report was Equality of Educational Opportunity. Coleman was interested in the educational opportunities that were available to different racial and ethnic groups in the schools of America. He collected data from over 4,000 schools and analysed the results of standardised tests on ability and achievement for 645,000 pupils. The outcomes were used to relate school resources to pupil achievement. The main conclusion was that school differences accounted only for 5 to 9 per cent of differences in pupils’ achievement. Unfortunately, even today, things have not changed much regarding these figures. From the early 1980s, the school effectiveness studies of the first wave were criticised on the grounds that they were biased and lacking verifiable evidence for their empirical claims. For instance, Purkey and Smith (1983), in one of the first review studies in the area of school effectiveness, distinguished the five following weaknesses of the studies of the first wave:

  1. 1.

    small and unrepresentative samples;

  2. 2.

    possible errors in identifying effective schools;

  3. 3.

    achievement data aggregated at the school level;

  4. 4.

    inappropriate comparisons; and

  5. 5.

    the use of subjective criteria in determining school success.

Then, the second wave of school effectiveness studies came along, beginning in the mid-1980s. This was the era when researchers attempted to address the criticisms of the previous generation and, most importantly, to utilise new statistical techniques that took into consideration the hierarchical structure of educational systems. In the early 1980s, new statistical algorithms and packages were developed simultaneously in the USA and the UK. The new statistical models were called “hierarchical linear models”, “parameter-varying models” and “multi-level/multivariate models”. Since then, school effectiveness research has moved along and all of the main school effectiveness variables have been included in the equation. One of the main school effectiveness variables researched in the literature is, of course, school leadership – hence the birth of this Special Issue of IJEM, where we explore school leadership and its effects on student achievement.

In the first paper of this Special Issue, “A validation study of the leadership styles of a holistic leadership theoretical framework”, Stefan Brauckmann and Petros Pashiardis mention that the overall purpose of their paper is to describe the EU-funded Leadership Improvement for Student Achievement (LISA) project. In this study, the main aim was to explore how leadership styles, as conceptualised in the developed dynamic Pashiardis-Brauckmann Holistic Leadership Framework, directly or indirectly affect student achievement at the lower secondary level of education in seven European countries. In its methodological design the study is a mixture of research methods and collaborative action research shared by practising school leaders and researchers. As Brauckmann and Pashiardis claim, the quantitative analyses stemming from confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation models (SEM) identified five robust underlying dimensions of practised leadership styles across the seven participating European countries, namely England, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Slovenia, and The Netherlands. Indeed, their preliminary results constitute an enrichment in the grounding of hypotheses and theoretical ideas as well as professional development for both school principals and researchers. Such an equal contribution of school leaders and school leaders’ organizations and researchers working in unison could probably provide a model for future professional development programmes for both groups of professionals.

The next paper in this issue, “Leadership effects on student achievement and sustained school success” by Stephen Jacobson, sets out to examine the effects of leadership on student achievement and sustained school success, especially in challenging, high-poverty schools. In terms of its methodological approach, the paper combines a review of the leadership literature with qualitative findings drawn from longitudinal studies of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP). In the discussion of his findings, Jacobson is guided by a set of core leadership practices as identified by Leithwood and Riehl with regards to direction setting, developing people and redesigning the organisation, which were practices common to successful principals in all contexts, including those in challenging, high-poverty schools. How these practices were exhibited varied in relation to national context and tradition. As he further reports, distributed teacher leadership and professional self-renewal emerged as processes central to sustaining success, and, in at least one US case, a change in organizational governance was necessary to allow these processes to continue over time. The paper certainly adds to the literature on leadership effects on student achievement and sustaining school success, especially in challenging, high-poverty schools. Moreover, we would add that the initial ISSPP cases reveal that leadership for student success in all schools, especially those in challenging, high-poverty communities, is a dynamic, ongoing process and as Jacobson suggests, one or two-year examinations of what has transpired in a school are insufficient to truly understand leadership effects over time, especially as we come to understand that school improvement cannot depend upon one person.

In the next paper, “Leadership and organisational performance: from research to prescription?” by Daniel Muijs, we get an overview of research on the impact of leadership on student outcomes, the main leadership activities related to these outcomes, and strengths and weaknesses in the current research base. Effectively, this paper is a literature review of key papers addressing the relationship between leadership and student outcomes through a consultation of key authors and journals in the field. What Muijs basically tells us is that leadership has a significant indirect impact on student outcomes, though the role of school context in shaping leadership is important. He further reports that there is some evidence for impact of transformational, distributed and instructional leadership. On the other hand, as he purports, the evidence base for an impact of leadership development is limited. He continues by stressing the fact that the research base suffers from significant weaknesses, such as dualism, over-prescriptivity, lack of international research, limited methodologies, and poor measurement. Overall, he concludes that the view that leadership matters, as espoused by policymakers in many countries, is supported by the literature, though to a lesser extent than one might imagine from some of the rhetoric.

The next paper, “Revised models and conceptualisation of successful school principalship for improved student outcomes” by Bill Mulford and Halia Silins, presents models and a reconceptualisation of successful school principalship for improved student outcomes. This study’s approach is qualitative and quantitative culminating in model building and multi-level statistical analyses. Some of the major findings, according to Mulford and Silins, indicate that principals who promote both capacity building and systems of accountability and evaluation, to the extent that their teachers perceive these two factors as characterising their schools, advance student empowerment, social development and academic achievement. Furthermore, other success factors include student home educational environment, the values and beliefs of teachers, and principal years in a school and hours worked. They conclude that based on their study, it can be demonstrated that the negative effects of socio-economic disadvantage can be moderated, a very promising outcome indeed. Moreover, they provide us with insights into how schools and their principals can best achieve a broad range of student outcomes. For example, as the two researchers claim, the most direct route for a school to achieve academic success is the indirect route through fostering student social development. It is worth noting that the study represents the culmination of a five-year research journey on school principalship that improves student outcomes. As the authors stress, it is one of the few studies available that examines most of the factors that may influence a school’s success in three categories of student outcomes, i.e. academic achievement, social development and student empowerment.

The final paper included in this Special Issue, “Exploring the impact of school leadership on pupil outcomes: results from a study of academically improved and effective schools in England” by Pam Sammons, Qing Gu, Christopher Day, and James Ko, explores the impact of school leadership, particularly that of the principal (headteacher), on school improvement in England. The study adopted a mixed methods longitudinal design to investigate the leadership of academically effective and improving schools identified from analyses of national assessment and examination data sets. In addition, questionnaire surveys of principals and key staff and 20 qualitative school case studies were conducted. The paper reports results from the questionnaire analyses and changes in measures of school performance over three school years using data from 378 primary and 362 secondary schools. As the authors mention, the analyses identified robust underlying dimensions of leadership and school and classroom processes and highlighted strategies and actions that school principals and staff had adopted to raise pupil attainment. They further stress that this original empirical study presents new results on the leadership of a large sample of effective and improving primary and secondary schools in England. A dynamic model is presented predicting changes in schools’ academic performance over three years and identifying direct effects of leadership on school and classroom processes and indirect effects on improvements in schools’ academic results.

The idea that emerges from this edited volume of research is that the future of the study of school leadership and its effects on student achievement is not simply through more complex statistical analyses and large international studies. The way forward for the years to come needs to advance through a study of the unique characteristics of the context of each educational system, its history, culture and local needs. The quest for leadership effectiveness can be better conducted at the local level. This is the main way in which leadership effectiveness will continue to be an interesting area of inquiry at an international level. In short, the future of school leadership and its effects on student achievement rests on the premise that even though we are dealing with global concerns and issues, the solutions must be local.

In closing this Guest Editorial, we would like to stress that the concrete, everyday realisation of school leadership has to take the context into account: leadership is always context-specific. In general, leadership is depending on and limited by the context. In particular, leadership, on the one hand, takes the context into account when it comes to analysing, evaluating and deciding how to act. On the other hand, leadership tries to influence the context to create better conditions for improvement (focusing on aims, integrating the different roles, integrating all stakeholders). School leaders need to be able to understand the complexity of the system and the complexity of the self. They need to be familiar with the potential “stumbling blocks” that may exist (both within the self and within the context) and how these obstacles can become challenges that they will need to overcome. School leadership must shape the school and its context in a way that the teachers who work there can then ideally be more effective in supporting their pupils to achieve better learning outcomes.

Petros Pashiardis, Stefan BrauckmannGuest Editors

References

Husén, T. (1984), “Introduction”, in Husén, T. and Kogan, M. (Eds), Educational Research and Policy: How Do They Relate?, Pergamon, Oxford

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