Research
NMFS provides white papers and current research relevant to transforming leadership and K12 learning.
Learning
Our key takeaways from the Wallace Report on How Principals Affect Students and Schools:
- “Hispanic and Black students experience the largest principal representation gap.”
- Replacing a below-average elementary school principal with an above-average principal would result in an additional 2.9 months of math learning and 2.7 months of reading learning each year for students.
- Replacing below-average principals with above-average principals for math would be “larger than more than two-thirds of of educational interventions and for reading it would be larger than about half of interventions.”
- The effect size of principals is greater than that of a teacher because the effect is felt across the whole school rather than one classroom.
- Principals can have an important impact on learning for minoritized communities including low-income students in areas such as discipline, culturally responsive teaching, and hiring diverse staff.
In Rebecca Winthrop’s 2018 book entitled Leapfrogging Inequality, she points out the need for students to possess broader skills. In addition to academics, students need skills such as critical thinking, collaboration, empathy, communication, and problem-solving. She further outlines the twin problems of our education system; 1) skills inequality (some students are served better than others in our system) and 2) skills uncertainty (skills needed for our fast changing society).
The study upon which the book is based, suggests that innovation is need to leapfrog (speed up the pace of change) in our education system.
"Across six rigorous studies on the principals' effects using panel data, principals' contributions to student achievement were nearly as large as the average effects of teachers identified in similar studies. Principals' effects, however, are larger in scope because they are averaged over ALL students in a school, rather than a classroom."