Explaining the Relationship Between Resources and Student Achievement: A Methodological Comparison of Production Functions and Canonical Analysis

What is the relationship between inputs to education and student achievement? The elusive answer to this seemingly self-evident question has led some to characterize the question as the “holy grail” of school finance research for the past thirty years

A Canonical Analysis of Successful vs. Unsuccessful High Schools: Accommodating Multiple Sources of Achievement Data in School Leadership

What distinguishes successful schools from unsuccessful schools? This question has relevance for the practice of educational leadership as well as the preparation of leaders

Training Principals to Ensure Access to Equitable Learning Opportunities in a High-Need Rural School District

During the mid-1980s in Kentucky, a grassroots advocacy group composed of 66 property-poor school districts, seven local school boards, and 22 public school students formed, calling itself the Council for Better Education, Inc

Education Funding and Student Outcomes: A Conceptual Framework for Measurement of the Alignment of State Education Finance and Academic Accountability Policies

The conceptualization and measurement of education finance equity and adequacy has engaged researchers for more than three decades. At the same time, calls for increased academic accountability and higher student achievement in K-12 public education have reached new levels at both the national and state levels

Measuring Equity: Creating a New Standard for Inputs and Outputs

What is the appropriate measure of equity in student achievement? An emerging theme in the literature is the convergence of the standards movement and school finance litigation and reform

Adding Soft-Skills to the Hard Target of Adequacy: The Case for Rearticulation Based on a Multifocal Analysis

The purpose of this study is to expand the definition of adequacy by adding soft skills as a measure of school productivity. The singular focus on academic standards inherent in education policy has prevented scholars from seeing the concept of adequacy through myriad perspectives and has contributed to a resegregation of schools. Education policy includes legal, historical, and political perspectives; research inquiries must accommodate these multiple foci. This study made use of multifocal analysis to investigate the development of the concept of adequacy in South Carolina. Conclusions suggest an expanded definition of adequacy has potential for addressing school financing policy, but also for making historical, political and legal contributions to educational and economic policies aimed at repurposing schools

Economic Growth, Productivity, and Public Education Funding: Is South Carolina a Death Spiral State?

As a result of the Great Recession of 2007-2009, most states experienced declines in employment, consumer spending, and economic productivity

Knowledge, Leadership and the Role of Spirituality: An Exploration of Principal as Spiritual Leader

Recent scholarship (Knapp, Copland, Honig, Plecki & Portin, 2010; Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, Anderson et al., 2010) demonstrates the impact of school leadership on student success. Using the research model of the ISSPP (Day, 2010), a team of researchers utilized a dynamic approach to identify leadership practices and beliefs that could be attributed to rises in student achievement and diminishing achievement gaps. In this paper, we present a cross-case analysis of three elementary schools in the southeastern US. Our findings highlight one particular aspect of these practices and beliefs: spirituality

Confronting Persistent Challenges through Research-Based Programming for Experienced School Leaders

This paper’s thesis of human agency derived from the South Carolina Successful School Principalship Project’s (SCSSPP) findings. In these schools, principals had leveraged a variety of schoolwide initiatives to enact the vision that all students would be successful despite their rurality and poverty. These findings were the underlying design for two regional cross-district pilot programs. Known as Leadership 2.0 and Leadership 3.0, the development of agency was constructed through cognitive coaching and based on principals of adult learning. Initial evaluation of participants\u27 first year reactions show consistently high perceptions of all aspects of the principals used for their professional learning

Learning and Reflection in the Midst of Persistent Challenges on Practicing School Leaders’ Time

Among the many scarce resources that principals must conserve and use wisely, time may present one of the more persistent challenges to their leadership practices. A simultaneous and equally challenging practice for school leaders is engaging in systematic reflection that serves to mitigate time constraints and emotional upheavals of the job. Reflection, and resistance to it, emerged as a theme during a yearlong-program that emerged from a school-university partnership, focused on the development of district-level coaches to support experienced principals in becoming more reflective leaders for continuous school improvement. The program uncovered principals’ resistance to the pauses in their practices that reflection requires. These principals and coaches also reported emotional reactions to persisting mandates on school accountability. This paper offers some insights into how reflection may balance the ongoing emotional dynamics and time constraints of schooling, and the degree to which the mentoring program supported principal protégés in this effort