The aim of this study is to determine the extent to which principals' self-ratings of leadership effectiveness coincide with their teachers' perceptions of their leadership effectiveness. Furthermore, we explore several characteristics of teachers and principals in an attempt to identify the factors that may predict congruence in…

Purpose: The past decade has seen considerable debate about how to best evaluate the efficacy of educational improvement initiatives, and members of the educational leadership research community have entered the debate with great energy. Throughout this debate, the use of randomized experiments has been a particularly contentious subject. This…

Research has consistently shown that principal leadership matters for successful schools. Evaluating principals on the behaviors shown to improve student learning should be an important leverage point for raising leadership quality. Yet principals are often evaluated with the use of instruments with no theoretical background and little, if any,…

The Vanderbilt Assessment of Leadership in Education is a 360-degree assessment of the effectiveness of principals' learning-centered leadership behaviors. In this report, we present results from a differential item functioning (DIF) study of the assessment. Using data from a national field trial, we searched for evidence of DIF on school level,…

We as a field believe that school principals can acquire new expertise by participating in principal preparation and professional development programs; however, we have few methodologies to measure leadership expertise, especially expertise that links leadership to improved student learning. In this article, we present the results of a study that…