Principal Leadership in a Virtual Environment

Commissioned by The Wallace Foundation, which supports efforts to promote effective school leadership, this report sets out to define what high-quality, equitable learning looks like in a virtual environment. It poses questions for school district leaders to ask if they want to develop principals who can lead their schools to this type of learning. It also describes strategies for districts to consider in efforts to develop a whole pipeline of principals adept at high-quality, equitable virtual learning—using a definition of an "aligned, comprehensive principal pipeline" that emerged through research and field work funded by The Wallace Foundation. The report is based on an examination of research literature supplemented by interviews with 11 principals and administrators knowledgeable about virtual learning. It also draws on Digital Promise's experience in working with schools and school districts. The final chapter looks at topics that merit further exploration in the areas of virtual learning, equity, and school leadership

Explaining and Predicting First Year Student Retention via Card Swipe Systems

Organizations know that retaining a customer is more cost effective than recruitment. Data analytics provide mechanisms for explaining and predicting customer retention. Challenges inherent to customer retention are even more pervasive within higher education, with freshman attrition being a significant problem. However, an untapped opportunity exists within most institutions’ existing systems infrastructure: identification card systems used to access campus facilities and campus services. Using knowledge from information systems, this research examines the potential of card swipe data to predict student retention. These ‘card swipes’, bound to a single student primary key in the database, provide a profile of student interaction in the campus environment that is rarely investigated by institutional researchers. This provides a new opportunity for furthering organizational intelligence within higher education by providing new dimensions of a student’s behavior. This research examines retention by social factors in addition to traditional academic factors