Principals are the second-largest school-based contributor to student achievement. Interventions focused early in the “pipeline” for identifying and developing effective principals might be a promising strategy for promoting principal effectiveness, yet no prior research has examined measures of principal performance during preservice preparation. We analyze 31 measures of principal practices developed by New Leaders and integrate into their year-long, preservice Aspiring Principals program. We link these measures to administrative data in nine districts to understand how they predict student and principal outcomes after candidate placement. We find associations with gains in student achievement on standardized tests, gains in student attendance, and higher rates of principal retention. We compare our results with studies of measures from licensure exams and evaluation systems.

Principals are the second-largest school-based contributor to K–12 students’ academic progress. However, there is little research evaluating whether efforts to develop principals’ skills improve school effectiveness. We conducted randomized controlled trial studies of the impacts of a professional development program called the Executive Development Program (EDP) and of the incremental effects of coaching to help principals implement the EDP curriculum. We find that the EDP alone influenced principals’ practices, but not student achievement, within 3 years. Coaching had a small positive effect on students’ English Language Arts achievement, but no effect on math achievement or on principals’ practices. Coaching had the largest effects in disadvantaged schools. We hypothesize that coaching enhanced the quality of implementation of recommended practices.

Background and Approach Nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, K-12 schools across the United States are struggling to remain open for in-person instruction.Inequities in academic outcomes are widening, with the most disastrous potential outcomes for students in higher-poverty schools and those who are learning remotely.1 Children's social-emotional health has been profoundly affected, and teacher morale is suffering.2 In a RAND Corporation survey of nearly 1,000 former public school teachers, almost half of those who left public school teaching early during the pandemic did so specifically because of COVID-19.3These impacts of the pandemic will have negative consequences for decades to come.Research to date suggests that in-person instruction, when coupled with appropriate mitigation strategies, is not a major contributor to COVID-19 transmission in communities. 4Nevertheless, some degree of transmission in school settings does

In 2017, the BHP Foundation launched its Education Equity Global Signature Program, which is meant to enhance opportunities for disadvantaged young people to access a quality education. It does so through investing in efforts that increase the use of evidence to improve education. This report is a summary of research for the baseline report of a five-year evaluation of this program.

TNTP, an organization committed to ending educational inequities by promoting the recruitment, training, and retention of high-quality teachers, implemented its Teacher Effectiveness and Certification (TEACh) initiative in three urban school districts. The authors investigated each district program's implementation and costs, the effects of TEACh on the recruitment and retention of teachers, and the relative performance of those teachers.

In this report, part of a series on professional development for school principals, the authors analyze the effects of a large-scale implementation of the National Institute for School Leadership's Executive Development Program (a widely used principal professional development program) and paired coaching for middle school principals in three states.

T his case study illustrates how one principal’s National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) Executive Development Program (EDP) experience and NISL coaching helped him work toward improving school culture and student performance by building teachers’ skills in order to deeply engage students in learning. The school was a high-performing high school and was designated a School of Distinction by the state. Student performance on state assessments, however, suggested room for improvement. Only about 60 percent of students earned “proficient” or “distinguished” scores on English, mathematics, or writing exams. The principal identified a culture of complacency among teachers and students. He decided to counter this complacency by providing intensive, ongoing professional learning that focused on teaching in ways that challenged students’ thinking and encouraged student ownership of their learning. The principal ensured, among other key strategies, that (1) structures supportive of school culture were in place, (2) teachers had opportunities to play leadership roles, and (3) teachers had a say in charting their professional growth. Although the principal met with some implementation challenges, the school improvement effort appeared to garner strong teacher buy-in over the course of two academic years, as evidenced by increased teacher satisfaction with professional learning opportunities C O R P O R A T I O N Research Report

T his case study illustrates how one principal’s National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) Executive Development Program (EDP) experience and NISL coaching helped him to build a collaborative, data-driven school culture focused on instructional quality and student achievement. Upon his arrival, the principal described the middle school as one with a culture of teacher isolation, little accountability for teacher collaboration and classroom-level results, and little to no common planning time. Staff members were siloed and did not have the tools necessary to use data to guide their instruction. The principal decided to implement professional learning communities (PLCs) and common assessments to motivate teachers to examine student data. He built capacity in his leadership team to help lead PLCs, and they, in turn, helped build teachers’ capacity to take ownership of such communities. He provided training and support to his staff on how to collect, analyze, and use data to guide instruction. He used staff feedback and observations to guide his continuous improvement efforts and better meet the needs of both his staff and students. Although the principal struggled to overcome a school culture in which teachers were unaccustomed to working together and teacher capacity limitations, among other implementation challenges, over the course of two academic years, teachers began collaborating between and within subject areas and grade levels, sharing their classroom data with each other regularly. In all, the principal’s efforts appeared to have strengthened trust among teachers and their resolve to improve instruction for students. C O R P O R A T I O N Research Report

T his case study illustrates how one principal’s National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) Executive Development Program (EDP) experience and NISL coaching helped her to work toward improving school culture and student performance through writing instruction. The principal focused on building teachers’ skills to teach critical writing—defined as writing across content areas that elicits deep thinking and makes such thinking visible so that teachers can identify any misconceptions students hold. This initial definition was later refined with teacher input. After taking the helm of the low-performing elementary school, the principal diagnosed it as having a culture of low expectations. She aimed to elevate teachers’ conceptions of what students were capable of and raise the standard of assigned work. Specifically, she believed that meaningful writing assignments would increase student engagement and learning. The principal promoted the idea of the school as a learning organization to engage her staff in continuous improvement and build teacher capacity to teach critical writing. Moreover, she worked to internally align instruction, curricula, standards, and assessments. Although the principal had to navigate some contextual challenges at the district level and uneven implementation of critical writing across the school, over the course of two academic years, teachers appeared to have embraced the importance of challenging students to demonstrate their learning through writing. Teachers also reported an increase in student engagement. Finally, in the fourth grade, where teachers were observably the strongest early implementers of critical writing, the percentage of students who performed at the lowest level on the C O R P O R A T I O N Research Report

This report presents findings from part of RAND's evaluation of the National Institute for School Leadership's Executive Development Program (EDP) for sitting school principals, focusing on how principals applied their EDP learning and coaching to their work as school leaders.

Policy makers and school leaders are perennially concerned with the capacity of the nation's public schools to recruit and retain highly skilled teachers. Over the past two decades, policy strategies including the federal No Child Left Behind Act and alternative pathways to teaching, as well as changes in the broader labor market, have altered the context in which academically skilled college graduates choose whether to enter teaching, and, if so, where to teach. Using data from 1993 to 2008, we find that schools nationwide are recruiting a greater share of academically skilled college graduates into teaching, and that increases in teachers' academic skills are especially large in urban school districts that serve predominantly nonwhite students. On the other hand, the increase in the share of academically skilled teachers coincides with the lower likelihood of nonwhite teachers being employed. Once teaching, nonwhite teachers report substantially lower job satisfaction than other teachers. The issue of how to recruit and support an academically skilled and diverse teacher workforce remains pressing.

Evidence that teachers' short-term instructional effects persist over time and predict substantial long-run impacts on students' lives provides much of the impetus for a wide range of educational reforms focused on identifying and responding to differences in teachers' value-added to student learning. However, relatively little research has examined how the particular types of knowledge or skills that teachers impart to students contribute to their longer-term success. In this article, we investigate the persistence of teachers' value-added effects on student learning over multiple school years and across subject areas. We find that, in comparison with math teachers, English language arts (ELA) teachers' impacts on same-subject standardized achievement scores are smaller in the year of instruction, but that teacher-induced gains to ELA achievement appear to reflect more broadly applicable skills that persist in supporting student learning in the long run across disciplines. Our results highlight important variation in the quality of teacher-induced learning for long-run success, distinct from the variation across teachers in more typically measured short-term learning effects.

Nationwide, K–12 students designated as English language learners (ELLs) must learn both language and content simultaneously, and ELLs score far below the national average in math achievement. Many educators have suggested that identifying or developing teachers with skills specific to ELLs' instructional needs may be critical to addressing this challenge. This study seeks to identify the characteristics and learning experiences of general education teachers who are differentially effective at promoting math achievement among ELLs compared to non-ELLs. Our analyses indicate that individual teachers can learn specific skills that make them more effective with ELL students. In particular, prior experience teaching ELLs predicts improvements in novice teachers' differential instructional effectiveness with ELLs. We also find that both in-service and pre-service training focused on ELL-specific instructional strategies are associated with higher differential gains for ELLs. Our findings lend support to the notion that general education teachers can develop valuable ELL-specific instructional skills.

The Leading Educators Fellowship program is dedicated to training promising mid-career educators to lead their colleagues in pursuit of student success. This report presents findings from preliminary analyses of the program's impacts on student achievement and teacher retention in both Louisiana and Missouri in the 2011–2012 through 2013–2014 school years for teachers who are program fellows and for the teachers mentored by fellows.