The Role of School Leadership on Student Achievement: Evidence from Timss2003
Leadership, and especially head-teachers¿ leadership, has been object of study since the late ¿60s, but the concept of leadership is neither unanimously defined, nor a consensus has been yet reached on its actual role and actual relevance within the school environment. Good leadership can certainly contribute to school improvement by abetting the motivation, participation, and coordination of the teachers; recent studies have widened the range of action of school leadership research to the various organizational levels: school managers, department heads, coordinators, teachers, and distributed leadership that could yield a higher impact on student achievement than what yet showed. This dissertation takes its moves within the strand of research that identifies a significant role of leadership for student achievement and tries to understand whether there are patterns of behavior of head-teachers that yield better results than others with respect to facilitating the student learning process and whether such patterns are consistent or replicable across countries.
To address this question, the study uses the TIMSS2003 and investigates the relationship between head-teacher time allocation and school characteristics, student background, and student achievement in 18 countries. The model used in the empirical analysis is a three level Multilevel Model with random effects (evaluated using the R-Statistics software) that aims at evaluating the interaction effect between a particular school level variable (the time used by the head-teacher in managerial or leadership activities) and the explanatory variables describing school and student characteristics. What the study shows is that head-teacher specialization (either in management or in leadership) has negligible direct effect on student achievement. Most of all, however, head-teacher specialization reduces the impact that family SES has on student achievement. Moreover, by investigating the impact of school management and school leadership on student achievement on a country-by-country level, a parallelism emerges between the institutional characteristics of school systems and the prevalent head-teacher specialization effect, suggesting that head-teachers are professional that do their best to favor the good functioning of their schools by using the tools that the existing regulations give them.
VIDONI Daniele;
BEZZINA Christopher;
GATELLI Debora;
GRASSETTI Luca;
2008-01-30
OPOCE
JRC42802
978-92-79-08111-8,
1018-5593,
EUR 23072 EN,
OP LB-NA-23072-EN-C,
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC42802,
10.2788/61252,
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