Developing the Right Principals for High-Poverty Schools

It’s no secret high-poverty schools need the right principals to give students the best chances of success. But one thing remains a mystery: What’s the most effective way to prepare these education leaders? A recent study aimed to find out.  

A preparation program designed for school principals, called “Bright New Leaders for Ohio Schools” (Bright), was the subject of the stated study. Bright differs from traditional methods of preparing principals by placing aspiring principals in Ohio public schools for a year, where they:

• work under the mentorship of an accomplished principal
• also learn from a principal coach, a master teacher and an executive-level business leader
• simultaneously work toward earning their MBA with a heavy emphasis on education leadership theory and practice

An earlier study, funded in 2018 by the Fisher Leadership Initiative, seemed to reveal these “Bright” principals were at least as effective as other principals who had undergone more traditional preparation. However, this first cohort had too small a sample size to be conclusive.

This new study built on the first by analyzing additional data from the original cohort of “Bright” principals and connected that with information on how a second cohort performed in their first year after being placed in their respective schools.

In the 2016-2017 school year, 41 percent of Ohio’s public schools had student poverty rates of 50 percent or greater; those schools also had higher-than-average rates of principal and teacher turnover than schools with lower poverty rates. By aiming to place its graduates into these schools, Bright is designed to address persistent problems of inequitable learning outcomes across Ohio’s schools.

While preliminary results for the second cohort of Bright principals showed that average student achievement was slightly lower than that of the comparison principals, the difference was too small to be practically meaningful (less than 1% of the variance in learning was explained by whether or not a new principal graduated from Bright). Unfortunately, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, teacher and principal interviews intended to learn more about whether and, if so, how Bright graduates lead differently than non-Bright graduates could not be completed. The results at this point thus remain partly inconclusive because of a combination of insufficient data and the tendency for the effects of principals on student achievement to be filtered indirectly through teachers. One positive finding worth special note is that, by design, Bright has one of the highest rates among Ohio’s principal preparation programs of placing graduates directly into high poverty schools.

Ultimately, the results of this research could have a profound effect on how leaders in education are selected and trained. Stay tuned for more information!