The purpose of this article was to evaluate the extent to which research in educational leadership and management reflects the core principles of estimation thinking – a statistical thinking that prioritizes estimation over binary hypothesis testing and emphasizes effect sizes, precision, uncertainty, and the practical implications of research findings. Estimation thinking encourages more nuanced, context-sensitive interpretations of evidence that support informed decision-making and cultivate educational leaders’ critical judgment and habits of reflective thinking. Using a 12-item analytic rubric developed through (a) a comprehensive literature review, (b) iterative discussion and feedback, and (c) multiple rounds of pilot testing, reflection, and revision, we systematically analyzed 516 quantitative studies published between 2005 and 2024 in three major refereed educational leadership journals to assess their alignment with estimation thinking. We found that despite some progress over the years, dichotomous thinking continues to dominate research in the field. Three of the 12 criteria were satisfied by fewer than 10% of the studies, and another four by only 10% to 30%. Only two criteria, reporting sample sizes and descriptive statistics, were fulfilled by over 90% of the reviewed studies. There were also notable variations across journals and methods in the prevalence of estimation thinking. We highlight the considerable room for improvement in conducting, reporting, and interpreting quantitative research and elucidate the importance of estimation thinking for research and practice in educational leadership. We conclude by calling on journal editors, researchers, and educators to shift the scientific culture toward estimation thinking.
Purpose This article promotes estimation thinking as both a methodological stance and a logic of theorizing aimed at enhancing theoretical precision. Estimation thinking is defined as an inferential approach that moves beyond null hypothesis significance testing by emphasizing effect-size estimation, acknowledging uncertainty, and accumulating evidence through meta-analytic synthesis. Theoretical precision, in turn, refers to the extent to which a theory makes specific, testable predictions about relationships. To operationalize theoretical precision, this article proposes a quantitative research framework that applies estimation thinking to two key criteria for evaluating theories: utility and falsifiability. Proposed Framework In the proposed framework, to increase theoretical utility, researchers are recommended to model contextual variations (e.g., conditions and effect heterogeneity) and address endogeneity. To strengthen the falsifiability of theories, researchers are recommended to specify the uncertainty (e.g., confidence or credible intervals), magnitude (e.g., a range of values or a point value via effect sizes), and form (e.g., linear, curvilinear with its peak at a particular point, or logarithmic) of relationships between constructs. Implications The proposed framework aligns empirical inquiry with theoretical precision, which helps bring the empirical “foot” and theoretical “foot” of educational leadership into synchronization. By focusing on inferential accuracy and the nature of relationships, the proposed framework provides a path toward more applicable and testable theories in an applied field of educational leadership.
Purpose: Research indicates that building schools and districts capable of problem solving and continuous improvement requires focused effort to develop internal capacity for organizational learning. As a field, however, we lack substantial evidence regarding the ways that this capacity manifests within education organizations and how it can be nurtured, sustained, and leveraged within the complex world of public schooling. This study explores how one team of school district leaders set out to build and nurture a culture of learning and improvement throughout their district. Methods: This study investigates an instrumental case of school district leaders building such a culture in their district. Through analysis of interviews with leadership team members, focus groups of improvement teams, and observations of key learning routines, we examine the values, beliefs, and norms of practice that frame a culture of organizational learning and improvement, and the practices leaders enacted to build it. Findings: Our analysis indicates that the culture of learning and improvement district leaders endeavored to create in their district rested on three elements: distributed leadership and shared authority, relational trust and collective efficacy, and an improvement mindset . Implications: Our findings support existing research indicating that the complex work of improvement rests on shared beliefs, values, and norms held by leaders and educators – and extend our understanding of how those elements of culture are both defined and operate interdependently. The findings also illuminate everyday practices and ways of work enacted by leaders as they supported the culture of improvement in their school district.
Educators who share knowledge deemed ‘dangerous’ by the state face unique pressures to comply with repressive policies, while at the same time uniquely positioned to resist them. In East Jerusalem, public schools are subject to coercive policies aimed at ending the use of Palestinian Authority (PA) curriculum. New policies tie school funding to the use of Israeli curricula and teacher certification to standards set by the Israeli Ministry of Education. In response, “retraining” programs for in-service teachers with degrees and certifications issued in areas under PA without formal training or experience with the Israeli curriculum have opened. Leaders staffing and designing these programs must balance their responsibility to the teachers they serve with the costs of refusal. Drawing on critical policy analysis, this study examines one such program at the Hebrew University for Palestinian teachers from East Jerusalem currently teaching the Israeli civics curriculum. Based on interview and questionnaire responses from over half of all program graduates, as well as interviews with teacher-educators, administrators and internal documents, this study details the ways that program leaders and graduates engaged and resisted the aims of the Israeli government in their work. Program administrators exploited what agency they had to ensure the program gave teachers the pedagogical permission and knowledge of ministry restrictions to continue teaching the Palestinian narrative within the constraints set by the Israeli government. Moving beyond binaries of resistance or compliance, this study offers one answer to how educational leaders might consider their conflicting responsibilities when confronting undemocratic policy.
This multiple case study examines how contextual elements shape elementary school principals’ enactments of state-level anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Grounded in policy enactment theory, this work draws on interviews from a larger comparative case study to understand how elementary principals in sociopolitically distinct districts enacted North Carolina’s 2023 Senate Bill 49 in their schools. We found that district policy, community culture, instructional resources, and professional judgement informed principal enactments of three legislative provisions: processes for parental objections to materials; instructional bans; and reporting student name and pronoun changes. Principals subsequently adhered to, overcomplied with, or refuted the policy, enacting SB49 in disparate ways despite the influence of similar elements on their practice. This work highlights how contextual factors inform elementary principals’ engagement with anti-LGBTQ+ policy priorities and holds implications for how these policies may in turn impact school community members across varied contexts.
