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More details emerging on program reviews: world languages, K-3 education, and audits

Management Matters

Various administrative disciplines, including education administration, have long debated whether there is a difference between "leadership" and "management."  Conventional wisdom seems to hold that what organizations need are more leaders and fewer administrators with an exclusively management focus.  In education especially, this has led to a major emphasis on instructional leadership as the defining capacity of an effective school administrator.

A number of important authors have pointed out that this is a false dichotomy, however.  Large organizations require some degree of effective bureaucratic management to be successful, but when the organizations in question are schools, effective management must always be in the service of supporting high levels of student learning (for a vivid example of this perspective, see Deal and Peterson, The Leadership Paradox: Balancing Logic and Artistry in Schools).

Still, our emphasis of late has been on instructional leadership rather than organizational management for good reasons.  There is a recognition that in the past some principals may not have been effective instructional leaders, but in today's accountability-driven educational environments, they must understand effective instruction and build capacity for improved teaching and learning.  This perspective has been so prevalent that some have dismissed organizational management as being relatively unimportant in today's schools, or at least a capacity that can be delegated to others.

AERJcover_LowRes[1] But a new study published in the American Educational Research Journal suggests that principals who effectively carry out tasks associated with organizational management may also be building the best environment for high-levels of student achievement.  (Full text unavailable; an earlier version of the study, conducted by Jason Grissom and Susanna Loeb, is available here).

Grissom and Loeb's study, which examined principals in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools, is important for a number of reasons.  First, it is built around a survey of principal tasks (rather than just behaviors, as  in many previous studies) by which principals rate their effectiveness (so the focus is not merely on whether the principal does the task, but how well he or she does them).  Using factor analysis, the authors were able to group these tasks into four major categories: instruction management, internal relations, organizational management, administration, and external relations, and use regression analysis techniques to determine which tasks, done effectively, best predicted higher levels of student achievement.

The organizational management tasks were the only category that, for this sample, significantly predicted positive student learning outcomes.  Organizational management tasks included the following:

  • Developing a safe school environment
  • Dealing with concerns from the staff
  • Managing budgets and resources
  • Hiring personnel
  • Managing personal, school-related schedule
  • Maintaining campus facilities
  • Managing non-instructional staff
  • Interacting/networking with other principals

The authors also found that these tasks predicted teacher satisfication and parents' ratings of school performance.  In an additional effort to triangulate results, the authors found that assistant principals' ratings of their principals performance on these tasks followed the same pattern.  Interestingly, effectiveness in instructional management tasks was not related to any of these variables in this particular study.

Grissom and Loeb are careful to emphasize that their findings do not suggest another pendulum swing is in order, whereby we might now focus on organizational management instead of instructional leadership.  Rather, they believe their study indicates how both instructional and organizational management support each other in a natural and necessary sort of way:

Rather, we might conceive of effective instructional leadership as combining an understanding of the instructional needs of the school with an ability to target resources where they are needed, hire the best available teachers, and keep the school running smoothly.  At the margins, principal efficacy in these latter functions may be more important for school effectiveness than previous work has articualted.  Principals devoting significant energy to becoming instructional leaders--in the narrow sense--are unlikely to see school improvement unless they increase their capacity for Oragnizational Management as well.

These findings emphasize a key point: no matter how important instructional leadership is for today's principals, if the key tasks of organizational management are done ineffectively, school culture and climate, parent perceptions, and ultimately student learning will suffer as a result.

Grissom, J. A., & Loeb, S. (2011). Triangulating principal effectiveness: How perspectives of parents, teachers, and assistant principals identify the central importance of managerial skills.  American Educational Research Journal 48(5), 1091-1123.    

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