School Leadership Quality
by James Spillane

Winter, 2008, Volume 30, Number 1

Teacher quality has garnered much attention from a diverse group of scholars. A natural next step is to focus on the quality of school leadership and management.  After all, the policy environment holds schools, not individual classroom teachers, accountable.

By extension, from the work on teacher quality, the obvious response is to examine principal quality by looking at their expertise, certification, experience, and so on. While this empirical research on principal quality is important and necessary, more will be needed for good proxies of leadership and management quality.

I’d argue that expertise or capability are not entirely an individual affair. Performance of core tasks critical to school improvement might be distributed over two or more leaders in a school.

This is an acknowledgment that the work of leading and managing the school involves a team of individuals with formally designated leadership positions, such as assistant principals and curriculum coordinators, and that this team’s “aggregate” expertise and capability might be key in ascertaining the school’s leadership and management quality. Were we really ambitious, we might even try to measure the contribution of informal leaders,
especially teacher leaders.

Thinking about expertise and capability as distributed, we have to go beyond simply acknowledging individual expertise to considering how they complement one another in the performance of key school improvement tasks. Also, recognizing that expertise is situated further complicates the measurement task. A situated perspective would press us to acknowledge and understand how what counts as quality or capability in school leadership and management might differ, depending on such factors as the student population served and the teacher workforce in a school.

Work on teacher quality in the education sector has greatly benefited from the field of economics. Similar benefits can be gained from work in distributed and situated cognition. Let’s not fall into the trap of easy measures and quick fixes when it comes to studying and measuring that quality. If we do, our “easy measures” will eventually lead to the erroneous conclusion that measuring the quality of school leadership and management is impossible.

IPR Faculty Fellow James Spillane is Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Chair of Learning and Organizational Change. This is an edited version of “Gauging the Quality of School Leadership” that appeared in Education Week on January 10.