Instructional Leadership, Teaching Quality, and Student Achievement Suggestive Evidence from Three Urban School Districts

摘要

This report was not intended to be an evaluation of the impact of the Institute for Learning's (IFLs) work, which would have assessed whether changes in instructional quality and student achievement took place over and above what would have occurred without the IFLs presence in the schools and districts. Instead, the analysis tests the IFL theory of action by examining the empirical relation-ships among measures of principal, teacher, and student behavior and performance that are associated with each step in that theory. It finds evidence of systematic relationships that is consistent with the conceptual framework: Statistically significant linkages connect variables at each step in the theory of action with variables at the next step. While these findings are suggestive and promising, however, limitations in the research design and the data collected mean that these linkages cannot be interpreted as causal; on the question of causality, the results are ulti-mately inconclusive.