Instructional Leadership in Charter Schools: Is There an Organizational Effect or Are Leadership...

Leadership and Policy in Schools, 11:1–25, 2012Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1570-0763 print/1744-5043 onlineDOI: 10.1080/15700763.2011.611923

Instructional Leadership in CharterSchools: Is There an OrganizationalEffect or Are Leadership Practices

the Result of Faculty Characteristicsand Preferences?

PETER TRABERT GOFF, MADELINE MAVROGORDATO,and ELLEN GOLDRING

Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

Notable differences in leadership practices in charter and publicschools have been documented, as have differences in teacherattributes between these schooling sectors. Given that teachers arenot distributed to charter and public schools at random but ratherselect (and are selected by) these institutions, we ask: To whatextent do differences in teacher characteristics and preferencesinfluence leadership practices across schools? This study appliesregression analysis to assess the relationship between teacher char-acteristics and preferences and principal instructional leadershippractices. Contrary to expectations, we find that teachers’ charac-teristics and preferences do not shape their principal’s instructionalleadership practices.

This research was supported by the National Center on School Choice and the ExpERTprogram, which are funded by grants from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute ofEducation Sciences (IES) (R305A040043 and R305B080025, respectively). We are grateful toDr. John Cronin and his colleagues at the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) as wellas Dr. Brian Bontempo and colleagues at Mountain Measurement for their gathering the datafrom schools and teachers for the What Makes Schools Work (WMSW) project. For moreinformation, please visit the Center website at www.vanderbilt.edu/schoolchoice.

Address correspondence to Peter Trabert Goff, Leadership, Policy & Organizations,Vanderbilt University, 230 Appleton Place, Box 414, Nashville, TN 37203, USA. E-mail:[email protected]

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2 Peter Trabert Goff et al.

INTRODUCTION

A key argument for charter schools pertains to the notion that principals havemore freedom to recruit and hire high-quality teachers due to deregulationthat allows school leaders to circumvent certification requirements (Baker &Dickerson, 2006). Previous research has found that charter schools tend toattract teachers from more selective colleges (Baker & Dickerson, 2006) andthese teachers report more supportive, professional, autonomous workingconditions with more influence over decisions than their traditional publicschool counterparts (Bauch & Goldring, 1996; Cannata, 2007; Hoxby, 2002).Similarly, the literature suggests that school organizational conditions andleadership practices might be configured differently under school choicereforms (Hausman & Goldring, 2001; Fullan, 2006). Most researchers andadvocates argue that changes in principals’ roles and leadership practicesmay stem from increased responsiveness and accountability and reducedbureaucracy. However, there is limited attention to the proposition that prin-cipals’ roles and practices may differ in charter schools, not only because ofchanges in governance but also because of the nature of teachers who workin charter schools.

In this article we explore the nature of the relationships between prin-cipals’ instructional leadership practices and teachers’ characteristics andpreferences. We then investigate whether these relationships differ in charterand traditional public schools.

The Importance of Teacher Quality

Teacher quality is one of the most important school-level predictors of stu-dent achievement, and is therefore of paramount importance for improvingthe quality of education in public schools. Research has consistently doc-umented the positive effect of teacher quality on achievement outcomes.The classic Coleman Report concluded that teacher quality is a more impor-tant explanatory factor than any other school-level variable (Coleman et al.,1966). More recent research concurs with Coleman’s conclusion that teacherquality matters. Using the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment, Sanders &Rivers (1996) found that being taught by high-quality teachers has a sig-nificant enduring effect on student learning during elementary years. Theconverse is true for students who have minimally effective teachers. Studentstaught by several ineffective teachers during consecutive years have signifi-cantly lower achievement. Specifically, students in second, third, and fourthgrades who are taught by low-quality teachers score an average of 50 per-centile points below their peers who are taught by high-quality teachers(Sanders & Rivers, 1996). Using panel data from the UTD Texas SchoolsProject, Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain (2005) estimate that teacher qualityalone can account for 7% of the variance in student achievement gains.Other researchers have described the impact of high-quality teaching by

Instructional Leadership in Charter Schools 3

comparing it to the impact of other educational interventions. For example,the estimated benefit of a student having an average teacher versus one atthe 85th percentile is approximately equivalent to the impact of reducingclass size by one third (Hanushek, Kain, O’Brien, & Rivkin, 2005; Rockoff,2004).

High-quality teaching is beneficial for all students, but the impactof having high-quality teachers is even greater for struggling students.Sanders and Rivers (1996) explain, “[a]s teacher effectiveness increases,lower achieving students are the first to benefit” (p. 7). Research has alsoshown that traditionally low-performing groups such as low-income andminority students are more likely to be taught by underqualified teachers(Borman & Kimball, 2005; Hanushek et al., 2005). While looking at datafrom Texas, both Kain and Singleton (1996) and Ferguson (1998) found thatas the percentage of minority students in a given school increased, the aver-age teacher score on the Texas Examination of Current Administrators andTeachers (TECAT) decreased.

Having high-quality teachers is a particularly important considerationsince so many charter schools serve disadvantaged students. This occurs fortwo reasons, cost reduction and school mission. Charter schools are locatedin neighborhoods where rent costs are lower, in part because charter schoolsoften do not receive adequate public funding to cover all facility expenses(Lubienski, Gulosino, & Weitzel, 2009). Some charter management organiza-tions, such as KIPP and Aspire Public Schools, are driven by a mission toactively recruit and serve disadvantaged students (Goldring & Mavrogordato,2011).

The Relationship Between School Choice and Teacher Quality

While traditional public schools face constraints imposed by districts, stateand federal governments, and unions, charter schools are much less reg-ulated (Ballou & Podgursky, 1997; Burian-Fitzgerald, Luekens, & Strizek,2004). One of the greatest differences in regulation is in the area of teachercertification and licensure. While traditional public schools must hire certi-fied teachers, many states permit charter schools to hire uncertified teachers(Podgursky, 2008). This allows charter schools to recruit teachers from amuch larger pool of candidates to fill teaching positions, and in theory, thiswill raise teacher quality (Podgursky, 2008).

Traditional public schools may not be able to hire the most effectiveteachers because of bureaucratic red tape that impede the process (Ballou,1996; Ballou & Podgursky, 1997; Wise, Darling-Hammond, & Berry, 1987).For example, high-quality teachers may choose to avoid a cumbersomemultistep application processes at the district level that “tend[s] to lose can-didates in seas of paperwork” (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003, p. 26).Qualified teachers may apply for and accept positions well before the begin-ning of the school year while some school districts, particularly those with


high demand for teachers relative to the supply, may not hire many teach-ers until late in the summer after good candidates have already acceptedpositions elsewhere (Shields et al., 1999). Excellent candidates may alsosimply be overlooked because they do not come from a training programwith which the district is familiar. Strauss, Bowes, Marks, and Plesko (2000)surveyed more than 500 school districts in Pennsylvania and discovered thatdistricts are extremely likely to hire teachers from local colleges even if thoseteachers performed poorly on National Teachers Exams.

Previous research supports the idea that charter schools do in fact attracta different “type” of teacher. Charter school principals hire teachers thatdiffer from their counterparts who teach in traditional public schools. Forexample, charter schools tend to have larger proportions of teachers whograduated from selective undergraduate institutions (Baker & Dickerson,2006; Burian-Fitzgerald et al., 2004). As would be expected consideringthe absence of regulation regarding certification in some states, Podgursky(2007) looked at nationally representative data (1999–2000 Schools andStaffing Survey) and found that approximately 70% of teachers in charterschools were certified compared to 93% in traditional public schools. Thisstudy also found that teachers at charter school are less likely to have hadan education major in college as compared to those teachers in traditionalpublic schools.

The Relationship Between School Choice and InstructionalLeadership Practices

The limited research on school leadership in charter schools suggests thatthe roles and practices of principals are often configured differently than intraditional public schools (Hausman & Goldring, 2001). Portin, Schneider,DeArmond, and Gundlach (2003) conducted in-depth interviews of princi-pals, assistant principals, and teachers at 21 public, private, charter, contract,and magnet schools and found that principals in charter schools tend to havemore authority and that they distribute more of their leadership than theirpeers who lead traditional public schools. Data from a recent survey of char-ter school leaders show that principals have difficulty fundraising, managingfacilities, and negotiating with the traditional public school districts in whichthey are located. None of these areas are of concern for traditional publicschool principals (Campbell & Grubb, 2008). It seems that charter schoolleadership faces some unique challenges that can consume large amountsof time and detract their focus from other aspects of the principalship, suchas being an instructional leader.

Additional managerial responsibilities of charter school principals maybe tempered if a given charter school is affiliated with a larger system,network, or organization, such as a for-profit educational management orga-nization (EMO) or a nonprofit charter management organization (CMO), thatrelieves school leaders of tasks that do not relate directly to student learning.


For example, affiliation may help principals secure and maintain facilities,seek additional funding, and attract students. With this in mind, Cravens,Goldring, and Peñaloza (2009) investigated the differences in principal lead-ership roles in traditional public schools and charter schools and consideredthe influence of being affiliated with an EMO or CMO. They found that allcharter school principals (regardless of affiliation) reported a higher level offocus on traditional school tasks such as managing the building and staff,monitoring instructional improvement, recruiting and hiring teachers, anddeveloping school improvement goals than traditional public school princi-pals. However, there are differences within the charter school group in thatprincipals in affiliated charter schools exhibited a significantly greater focuson instructional leadership practices than their peers at independent charterschools. They also noted that principals at affiliated charter schools have aneven higher focus on traditional school tasks, while principals at indepen-dent charter schools focus more on choice-related tasks such as promotingthe school to parents and obtaining school facilities. Cravens et al. (2009)suggest that these differences in leadership practices may be due to theunique organizational features and governance structure of these schools.

Thus far researchers have hypothesized that differences in leadershipbetween charter and traditional public schools stem from the inherent differ-ences in governance, and from organizational features. The existing literaturedoes not address whether or not the differences in leadership practicesbetween charter and traditional public schools could be explained by fac-tors other than organizational features and governance structure. Given theextensive research that suggests that there are distinct differences in thenature of the teachers who serve at charter schools as compared to tra-ditional public schools, we ask in this study, does principal leadership atcharter and traditional public schools vary in part as a result of teachers’qualifications and preferences?

The Relationship Between Teacher Characteristics and InstructionalLeadership Practices

The way in which a principal chooses to lead could reflect the specificschool context. In fact, research has shown that the context of schoolsgreatly influences principal leadership. Manasse (1985) and Hallinger andMurphy (1985) have suggested that principal success might vary accordingto context: an individual who is effective in one context may not beeffective in another. Goldring, Huff, May, and Camburn (2008) found thatcontextual conditions such as academic press, student engagement, and thepercentage of disadvantaged students explained principals’ differences inbehavior more than their personal characteristics. One important dimensionof that context concerns the qualifications and attributes that teachers bringwith them. Principals may adapt their leadership practices to address the


specific needs and backgrounds of teachers so that teachers can maximizetheir impact on student achievement.

While a wide array of teacher characteristics could be linked to prin-cipal leadership practices, arguably some of the most important indicatorsto consider are those that school districts have traditionally used as proxiesfor teacher quality, such as teaching experience, certification, and collegeselectivity. Principals can easily observe these characteristics, and althoughresearch is mixed as to how these attributes actually impact achievement, thegeneral perception is that these characteristics signal higher quality teaching.Because of this, these attributes may be related to principals’ instructionalleadership practices. For example, principals may be more inclined to focuson instructional leadership if their faculty is relatively inexperienced andnew to the teaching profession (Bossert, Dwyer, Rowan, & Lee, 1982; Cohen,Miller, Bredo, & Duckworth, 1977; Dwyer, 1983).

Since teachers choose whether to work at traditional public or charterschools, it is also important to take teacher preferences into account. In addi-tion to differences in undergraduate education, as discussed previously, theliterature suggests that teachers in charter schools tend to have differentworkplace values and preferences than their counterparts in traditional pub-lic schools. For instance, charter school teachers are two to three times aslikely to indicate that agreeing with the school mission was one of the mostimportant factors in their decision to accept a position at their current school(Cannata & Peñaloza, 2010). When starting to work at the charter school, themajority (87%) of charter school teachers expect that their peers will be com-mitted to the school’s mission (Nelson & Miron, 2004). Having a sense ofcohesion around the school mission may prompt principals to alter theirleadership practices because they view teachers as part of a team that hasthe same goals for students. For example, a principal may be less likely toexhibit instructional leadership practices if it is evident that teachers coalescearound a mission to increase student achievement. Teachers at independentcharter schools are also more likely to value having autonomy over theirteaching (Cannata & Peñaloza, 2010). In a survey of charter school teach-ers across four states, Nelson and Miron (2004) found that 81% of teachersexpected autonomy when joining a charter school’s faculty. This may alterprincipals’ instructional leadership as well; principals may be inclined toassume fewer instructional leadership practices if their teachers feel stronglythat autonomy in the classroom is important.

As noted above, it is important to consider the role of school choicewhen looking at the relationship between school leadership practices andteacher characteristics. This is because research has observed differencesin teachers at charter schools and traditional public schools and differ-ences in leadership practices. Previous research (Cravens et al., 2009) andmarket theorists (e.g., Chubb & Moe, 1990) have suggested that the dif-ferences in leadership foci between traditional public schools and charterschools is likely due to the differences in governance structures of these


systems. However, leadership contingency theory suggests that there is notone set of leadership practices that is appropriate to all situations or schoolcontexts (Fiedler & Chemers, 1974; Hallinger & Murphy, 1987). Instead, con-tingency models of leadership suggest that leaders must take into accountthe characteristics of teachers as well as the broader school context andadapt their behaviors accordingly. This article explores the possibility thatthe differences in instructional leadership practices between charter and tra-ditional public schools may be explained by the attributes of the teacherswho work in them.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES

This article seeks to address the following questions:

1. What is the relationship between teachers’ characteristics and instructionalpreferences and principal’s instructional leadership practices?

2. Are there differences between charter schools and traditional publicschools in terms of the relationships between teachers’ characteristics andpreferences and their principal’s instructional leadership practices?

3. Does the relationship between teachers’ characteristics and preferencesand principal instructional leadership practices differ between indepen-dent charter schools and those affiliated with an education managementorganization or charter management organization?

We posit that there will be relationships between those teacher characteris-tics that have traditionally served as indicators of quality, as well as teachers’instructional preferences and principal instructional leadership practices.We also hypothesize that we will find differences in these relationships basedon school type (charter or traditional public). The autonomy afforded tocharter schools allows them to attract and hire teachers with different charac-teristics and preferences than their counterparts at traditional public schools.It follows that principals’ instructional leadership priorities may reflect thesedifferences. Additionally, we posit that charter school affiliation with a man-agement organization will further mediate the relationship between teachercharacteristics, as well as instructional preferences and principal instructionalleadership practices.

DATA

Sample

The schools for our study were selected from a set of schools that have con-tracted with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA) to assess studentachievement through the administration of computerized adaptive tests inmath, reading, and language arts every fall and spring of the school year.As of the spring of 2006, approximately 7,000 traditional public schools and


270 charter schools were tested by NWEA. We linked the NWEA schoolsto the public Common Core of Data (CCD) from the National Center forEducational Statistics to obtain school characteristics. Our sample frame wasdefined as the set of schools that could be found in the latest available CCDand files (i.e. the 2005–06 files), tested by NWEA in 2005–06, with at leastone grade having more than 50% testing coverage in both math and reading,and at least 10 students tested. We excluded special education, vocational,and alternative schools, schools that were no longer testing with NWEA, andschools that did not have all the variables that we needed for school match-ing. With all these requirements, our sample frame ended up consisting of223 charter and 5,864 traditional public schools as potential matches.

Traditional public and charter schools in our sample may differ on avariety of attributes that could influence school leadership and the differen-tial composition of the faculty. To reduce differences between schools thatcould bias our estimates, we used a matching process to create a sampleof charter and traditional public schools for our analysis. To mitigate differ-ences between schools owing to factors beyond school sector, we reducedour sample to a one-to-one matched set of schools with the criteria beingthat the traditional public school must be within twenty miles of the charterschool (the geographic distance between the schools was calculated usingthe longitude and latitude coordinates of the schools). This serves to reducebias resulting from regional differences and increases the probability thatschools will be competing for the same teachers. This process is furtherstrengthened by propensity score matching (with replacement) on school-level characteristics such as school size, student demographics, grade range,and family income variables. Grade range match was evaluated in terms ofboth reported grades and also tested grades; we tended to pick schools withthe greatest tested grade overlap. Our final sample consists of 59 traditionalpublic schools and 59 charter schools, 22 of which are affiliated with eitheran EMO or a CMO.1

Teachers and principals completed confidential questionnaires on-line.The teacher questionnaire included measures of working conditions andclassroom organization, instructional innovation, instructional conditions,influence on schoolwide decisions, professional development, principalleadership, career decisions, and qualifications. The questionnaire com-pletion rates for the teachers were 80.0% for the 59 charter schools(N = 1,015 of 1,269) and 72.5% for the 59 traditional public schools(N = 1,300 of 1,793). Missing data were imputed using a multiple imputationprocedure.2

Operational Measures

We include teacher characteristics that we posit may be related to princi-pal instructional leadership practices in our analysis. These characteristics


are traditional proxies of teacher quality, including total years of teachingexperience, certification, the highest degree the teacher holds, and collegeselectivity. Our analysis also incorporates several survey items measuring dif-ferential instructional preferences of teachers. Preference variables includethe importance of having autonomy over teaching, agreeing with the centralmission, being supported by the principal, and using the particular instruc-tional program used by the school. School size was included to control forthe potential impact of the size of the student body on instructional lead-ership practices, since many charter schools tend to have smaller studentpopulations.

While the explanatory variables consist of teacher responses, the depen-dent variables are principal responses about how principals structure theirtime and what instructional tasks and behaviors demand their attention. Theinstructional leadership measure is based upon a principal’s time allocationand areas of focus. The instructional leadership scale is discussed in detailbelow; scale reliability of the nine items is 0.85, and descriptive statistics forthis measure are shown in Tables 1 and 2.

Explanatory Variables: Traditional Indicators of Teacher Quality

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

We incorporate teachers’ total years of experience. The same principal maydemonstrate different leadership practices if he or she led a school with alarge concentration of inexperienced teachers compared to a school with

TABLE 1 Summary Statistics: Teacher Level Variables.

VariableTraditional

public schoolsCharterschools

Affiliatedcharters

Nonaffiliatedcharters

Traditional quality attributesTotal teaching experience∗ 12.73 7.45 7.44 7.45College selectivity∗† 3.18 3.06 2.91 3.20Education undergraduate degree∗† 0.63 0.55 0.64 0.47Highest academic degree 1.60 1.53 1.33 1.72Certification∗ 0.97 0.81 0.80 0.83(N ) 1300 1015 473 542

Teachers’ instructional preferencesInstructional autonomy∗† 3.82 4.06 3.96 4.12Fit with mission∗ 3.68 4.18 4.16 4.19Innovation∗ 3.61 3.89 3.82 3.98Instructional program∗† 2.72 3.05 2.78 3.23Support of principal∗ 4.29 4.38 4.42 4.36(N ) 791 645 257 388

Note. Total teaching experience is in years. College selectivity ranges from 1–6 (6 is most selective),academic degree ranges from 1 (BS) to 4 (PhD). Instructional preferences range from “not important atall” (1) to “extremely important” (5).∗indicates a significant difference between charter and traditional public schools at the 95% level.†indicates a significant difference between affiliated and nonaffiliated schools at the 95% level.


TABLE 2 Summary Statistics: School Level Variables.

Traditional Charter AffiliatedNon-

Affiliated(N = 59) (N = 59) (N = 22) (N = 37)

Variable Mean Mean Mean Mean

Control variableStudent-teacher ratio† 16.9 16.7 18.9 15.4% FRL 42 50 59 44% White (students) 61 49 45 51% Middle schools∗ 22 5 0 8Enrollment (2007)∗† 511 360 492 281

Dependent variableInstructional

leadership∗3.43 3.13 3.32 3.02

∗indicates a significant difference between charter and public schools at the 95% level.†indicates a significant difference between affiliated and nonaffiliated schools at the 95% level.

a large portion of seasoned educators (Bossert et al., 1982; Cohen et al.,1977; Dwyer, 1983). Charter schools, particularly those that are affiliatedwith an EMO or CMO, tend to employ teachers with significantly less expe-rience than traditional public school teachers (Cannata & Peñaloza, 2010).Therefore, we hypothesize that there will be a different level of instruc-tional leadership in charter schools as principals respond to the needs ofless seasoned faculty.

POSTSECONDARY EXPERIENCE

We use three variables to capture the potential role of a teacher’s collegeeducation in a principal’s instructional leadership practices. The first is ameasure of the selectivity of the undergraduate institution. College selectiv-ity is often used as a measure of teachers’ aptitude (Ballou, 1996; Ballou &Podgursky, 1997). We hypothesize that college selectivity may capture dif-ferential qualities in academic preparation as well as the self-selection thatoccurs upon matriculation into various universities. These qualities mayinfluence the academic preparedness of teachers, which in turn may modifyprincipal instructional leadership practices. Leadership differences promptedby the selectivity of teachers’ colleges may be evident across sectors sinceteachers who work at charter schools are more likely to have attended ahighly selective institution (Burian-Fitzgerald et al., 2004). Our college selec-tivity variable is the competitiveness rating from Barron’s Profile of AmericanColleges. Values ranged from 1–6, with 6 being the most selective. Criteriaused to determine rankings include entrance examination scores, class rank,and grade-point average of admitted students.

The second measure of college experience is a binary variable indicat-ing whether or not the teacher holds a bachelor’s degree in education or anacademic subject area. Education is recognized as a less challenging major


(Ballou, 1996), and many states require teachers to major in a specific con-tent area such as a science (chemistry, biology, etc.) or math, particularly ifthey teach in secondary schools. Principals may believe that teachers whohave education degrees may possess less content expertise, and as suchthey may take a more proactive role as an instructional leader by moni-toring the classroom curriculum and observing the classroom. Conversely,if teachers with education degrees hold a unique pedagogical skill set orknowledge base that teachers with academic majors do not possess, prin-cipals may adjust their leadership behavior to account for the pedagogicalexpertise their teachers possess. Charter school principals have been foundto hire a greater proportion of teachers with degrees outside of education(Podgursky, 2008). It logically follows that principals in charter schools mayexhibit different instructional leadership practices in response to having agreater proportion of teachers who have in-depth content area expertisethat they acquired while majoring in an academic subject area.

The final measure of a teacher’s college experience is a report of thehighest academic degree held. The values for this variable range from oneto four (BS/BA, MS/MA, EdD, PhD). The research literature is this area ismixed. Some studies have found that holding an advanced degree can infact contribute to student achievement outcomes (e.g. Cavalluzzo, 2004),while others have found that holding a master’s degree actually has a neg-ative effect on student achievement (e.g. Clotfelter, Ladd, & Vigdor, 2007;Harris & Sass, 2008; Monk, 1994). Despite the contradictory research find-ings, school systems traditionally recognize graduate-level education as asignal of higher teacher quality, which is evident in the pay increase pro-vided to teachers with master’s or doctoral degrees. Principals may also holdthis view, and we posit that they may assume different instructional leader-ship practices depending on the proportion of their faculty that has earnedadvanced degrees. For example, principals may be less inclined to facilitateprofessional development if they feel that their teachers had developmentopportunities while they were earning their post-baccalaureate degrees.

CERTIFICATION

The debate surrounding the value of teacher certification is evident in theresearch literature. Some scholars (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond, Berry, & Thoreson, 2001) claim that having a credentialedteacher is related to increased achievement. However, others (e.g., Ballou &Podgursky, 2000) argue that this research is not convincing due to researchdesign and data issues. More recent studies on teacher certification havefound that certification status has a negligible impact on student learningoutcomes (e.g., Kane, Rockoff, & Staiger, 2008). Despite the conflictingresearch results, traditional public school districts throughout the UnitedStates recognize certification as an indicator of teacher quality and almost


exclusively hire certified teachers due to No Child Left Behind require-ments. Many charter schools are exempt from regulations that apply totheir traditional public school counterparts, and this is reflected in that theproportion of certified teachers in charter schools is generally less than intraditional public schools (Kane et al., 2008). While the impact of certificationis unclear, principals, much like policymakers, may perceive certified teach-ers to have increased teaching capacity. If holding a certificate is thought tobe an indication of additional knowledge or a unique skill set, certificationstatus may reasonably alter a principal’s instructional leadership practices.In our certification variable, each teacher’s certification status is included as abinary variable where one represents a teacher with regular or probationarycertification.3

Explanatory Variables: Organizational Affiliation

Some charter schools are affiliated with an organization that may pro-vide training, resources, or may emphasize specific leadership behaviors.To explore this possibility, we include a dummy variable, where 1 indicatesthat the charter school is affiliated with an organization such as KIPP, GreenDot, or National Heritage Schools. Twenty-two of 59 charter schools in ourstudy belong to an EMO or CMO.

Explanatory Variables: Instructional Preferences of Teachers

A main thrust of this study is to investigate the possibility that different pref-erences of teachers at traditional public and charter schools may accountfor differences in instructional leadership practices in these sectors. It isimportant then to include specific factors that capture teachers’ preferencessurrounding instruction when they made the decision to take a position attheir school. Here we use five items from the teacher survey that indicatethe importance of: 1) having autonomy over teaching, 2) using innovativeinstructional strategies, 3) agreeing with the central mission, 4) being sup-ported by the principal, and 5) using the school’s particular instructionalprogram. Survey responses on these items range from 1 (not importantat all) to 5 (extremely important). Only teachers who indicated that theychose their current school from among one or more employment optionsresponded to these items; teachers who had only one offer did not respondto the instructional preferences items.

TEACHING AUTONOMY

Teachers at charter schools have been found to value autonomy in theirclassrooms more than their peers in traditional public schools (Cannata &


Peñaloza, 2010). The faculty’s desire for autonomy in the classroom mayinfluence a principal’s leadership practices. Teachers with a desire forclassroom autonomy may be more self-sufficient, encouraging a principalto instead focus on leadership practices outside the realm of instruction.Conversely, teachers who value autonomy less may look to their principalsto take a more active instructional leadership role to provide support forteachers who have deviated from a standardized curriculum.

INNOVATIVE INSTRUCTIONAL STRATEGIES

Most charter school laws include the desire to facilitate innovative teach-ing (Malloy & Wohlstetter, 2003). If teachers expressed a preference forinnovative instructional strategies, principals may assume a more activeinstructional leadership role as a means of demonstrating these nontradi-tional instructional practices and monitoring their implementation, or theymay take a more hands-off instructional approach by leaving it to teachersto drive innovation in the classroom.

AGREEMENT WITH THE CENTRAL MISSION

The literature emphasizes the importance of school mission in charterschools. Research suggests that charter school principals often try to con-nect their decisions back to their school’s mission (Wohlstetter & Griffin,1998). Shared beliefs about the school mission are an important elementof a teacher professional community that stresses commitment to studentlearning (Bryk, Camburn, & Louis, 1999). With school missions typicallyanchored in student learning, we may expect the principal’s practices toreflect a high level of instructional leadership in schools where teachersindicate that agreement with the school mission was an important factor intheir employment decision.

SUPPORT FROM PRINCIPAL

Instructional and curricular management are key component of instruc-tional leadership (Murphy, Elliott, Goldring, & Porter, 2007). In schoolswhere teachers indicate a strong preference for being supported by theirprincipal, principals may be more inclined to exhibit a higher level of instruc-tional leadership since teachers encourage their principal to be intimatelyinvolved in the instructional program and the coordination of the curricu-lum. This may be more important in charter schools (particularly those thatare independently operated) where there are not support structures (e.g.,professional development) offered by the broader school district.


USE OF SCHOOL’S PARTICULAR INSTRUCTIONAL PROGRAM

As a means of differentiating themselves, charter schools often have specificinstructional programs in place that are designed to attract a particular groupof students (Loveless & Jasin, 1998). Examples include rigorous curricularprograms such as International Baccalaureate, college preparatory programssuch as the Early College High School Initiative, or programs designed toserve a group of students with specific needs, such as targeting students withautism. Teachers who indicate that using a particular instructional programwas an important aspect of their decision to work at the school may lookto their principals to be strong leaders who keenly focus on instructionalleadership practices that coalesce around the specific instructional program.

Control Variables: School Context

Our matched sample consists of charter and traditional public schools withintwenty miles and within the same state. Although matched schools are withinthe same geographic proximity, several differences between schools mayremain. School leadership may be influenced by school context, as well asteacher characteristics and preferences (Hallinger & Murphy, 1987). To limitthe extent to which school context dictates leadership practices, we haveincluded several control variables. The student-to-teacher ratio, percent ofstudents receiving free or reduced lunch (% FRL), percent of white students,school level (elementary or middle school), and school size (enrollment)are arguably among the most important contextual factors that may influ-ence school leadership. For example, school size may influence leadershipbehavior, as many aspects of leadership behaviors are a function of resourceavailability. The resources in question here include time and personnel.Larger schools may take advantage of returns to scale through the distri-bution of various tasks throughout their administrative staff and teachingfaculty. Larger schools may also make a certain leadership tasks, such asclassroom observations, more challenging. School size, measured by studentenrollment, was included to control for the smaller size of charter schools.Since charter schools tend to be smaller than traditional public schools,school size has been included to control for differences attributable to scale.Student enrollment was used to as a proxy for school size.

Dependent Variable: Instructional Leadership

The measure of instructional leadership employed here is a 9-item scale inwhich principals indicated how often they work with teachers around issuesof curriculum and instruction or analyze student data (alpha 0.85). Consistentwith previous scales of instructional leadership (Hallinger & Murphy, 1987),examples of items include how often principals observe a teacher during


TABLE 3 Instructional Leadership Items.

How often did you do any of the following during this school year?

Demonstrate instructional practices and/or the use of curricular materialsObserve a teacher during classroom instructionExamine and discuss student workExamine and discuss standardized test results of students from a teacher’s classCreate and implement staff developmentPersonally provide staff developmentTroubleshoot or support the implementation of school improvement effortsMonitor the curriculum used in classrooms to see that it reflects the school’s

improvement effortsMonitor classroom instructional practices to see that they reflect the school’s

improvement efforts

classroom instruction, examine and discuss standardized test results andmonitor classroom instructional practices (see Table 3).

ANALYTICAL MODELS

To investigate whether teacher characteristics influence leadership practices,we use a simple regression analysis that utilizes the multiply imputed dataand corrects standard errors for clustering within schools. The question weexamine is whether or not differences in instructional leadership betweentraditional public and charter schools or within the charter sector areattributable to differences in teacher characteristics. Our base model includesdummy variables for school type (charter or traditional public) and charteraffiliation (affiliated or independent) to predict instructional leadership.

We next layer on the set of school-level controls to net out schoolcontext variables that could be related to instructional leadership practices.Our next model includes traditional indicators of teacher quality. Our finalmodel incorporates teacher instructional preferences. If the difference ininstructional leadership between traditional public and charter schools isattributable to teacher characteristics, we would expect to see the variablescapturing school type (charter and affiliated dummies) to be diminished inmagnitude, or perhaps find these coefficients reduced to statistical insignif-icance. If instructional leadership is independent of teacher characteristicsand more strongly related to the organizational characteristics unique tocharter and traditional public schools, the coefficient on the charter schooldummy variable will remain largely unchanged. The final model is shownbelow:

Leadershipi = β0 + βs(School)i + βc(Sector)i + βt(Teacher)ij + eij

In this model the dependent variable is instructional leadership within schooli, an average of the nine instructional leadership items described previously.


School is a vector of the five school-level variables that may influence differ-ences in instructional leadership between charter or public schools (percentstudents white, FRL, school size, student-teacher ratio, and middle school).A dummy variable “Charter” (1 indicating charter), and an organizationalaffiliation dummy (1 being an affiliated charter school), comprise the schoolsector variables. Teacher is the vector of ten teacher variables (quality char-acteristics and preferences) for teacher j in school i. The results of thisregression model are presented with a descriptive overview in the followingsection.

RESULTS

We first present descriptive statistics followed by the results from of ourregression models. The descriptive statistics below largely echo previousfindings on charter schools. Table 1 reveals significant differences betweenpublic and charter schools and within the charter school sector in terms ofteacher quality characteristics. Traditional public school teachers have, onaverage, nearly twice as much teaching experience than teachers at charterschools, but interestingly, teachers at traditional public schools are not morelikely to possess an advanced degree. Traditional public school teachers alsotend to be regularly certified at a higher rate (97 versus 81 percent) and aremore likely to hold a bachelor’s degree in education (63 versus 55 percent)than their peers at charter schools. This indicates that teachers at charterschools are more likely to be noncertified or alternatively certified teachers,a group of teachers less likely to hold an undergraduate education degree.Contrary to previous research findings, charter school teachers in our sampleactually come from slightly less selective colleges.

There are also some differences between teachers’ attributes evidentwithin the charter school sector. Teachers at nonaffiliated charter schoolsare more likely to have attended a more selective college than their peersat affiliated charters. However, teachers at affiliated charter schools are 17percent more likely to have a bachelor’s degree in education as comparedto independent charter schools.

Teachers in traditional and charter schools also differ in the extentto which they report that instructional preferences influenced where theychose to work. In order to make decisions about employment based onpreferences, teachers would have to choose among competing job offers(Cannata & Peñaloza, 2010). Only if teachers had a choice regarding theschool at which they accepted their current position did they respond tothese five items. That is, teachers who were transferred or who had onlyone offer were not asked how these instructional preferences factored intotheir choice to work at the current school.

Table 1 shows that 791 of 1300 teachers choose among multipleschools when deciding to work at traditional public as compared to 645 of


1015 teachers working in charter schools (61% to 64%). Within charterschools, 72% of teachers (257 of 473) in affiliated schools chose among mul-tiple positions as compared to 54% in independent charter schools (388 of542). Charter school teachers report a significantly stronger preference forinstructional autonomy, an alignment with the school mission, the use ofinnovative instructional strategies, the instructional program of the school,and support from the principal when choosing a place to work. The great-est difference is in teachers’ rating of the importance of agreeing with theschool’s mission when making the decision to work at the school. This con-curs with the literature that has found that school mission is particularlyemphasized in charter school settings (Wohlstetter & Griffin, 1998). To theextent that these items reflect teacher sorting, this may represent preliminaryevidence that teachers are selecting into charter schools based upon crite-ria that relate directly to the instructional climate of the school. Within thecharter sector, teachers from independent charter schools appear to valuethese instructional preferences more so than teachers from affiliated charterschools.4 It is also interesting to note that all teachers in all sectors reportedthat support from the principal was most important while the particularinstructional program was the least important.

Table 2 captures the differences that exist between principals andbetween schools within our sample. Regarding school size, public schoolsare notably larger than charter schools in our sample by over 150 stu-dents per school. Within charter schools, affiliated charters are significantlylarger than nonaffiliated charter schools—75% larger on average. Table 2also displays principals’ instructional leadership, the dependent variable ofthis study. Charter school principals display significantly less instructionalleadership than do their peers in traditional public schools, according toself-reports. Looking within charter schools, affiliated charters report moreinstructional leadership than independent charter schools (this differencebeing significant at the ten, rather than the five percent level). This pat-tern is consistent with the theory that principals working within schoolswith more organizational capacity are more likely to have the time to directtoward instructional leadership practices, as these organizations absorb themanagerial or bureaucratic tasks that may otherwise demand their attention(Cravens et al., 2009).

Table 4 shows the four regression models that analyze whether teachercharacteristics play a role in explaining the differences in principal instruc-tional leadership practices between charter schools and traditional publicschools. The rationale behind our approach is to create a model that mea-sures the differences in instructional leadership between traditional publicand charter schools and then introduce teacher characteristics to determineif these factors collectively account for between-sector differences. The firstmodel reiterates the between- and within-sector differences that were pre-sented in Table 2, namely that charter schools demonstrate significantly


TABLE 4 Effects of Teacher Characteristics on Instructional Leadership.

(1) (2) (3) (4)Base School Quality Preferences

Charter −0.556∗∗ −0.419∗ −0.415∗ −0.431∗

(0.005) (0.018) (0.019) (0.014)Affiliation 0.387 0.371 0.361 0.390

(0.065) (0.101) (0.111) (0.078)School context

Student to teacher ratio −0.023 −0.022 −0.017(0.382) (0.401) (0.507)

% FRL −0.248 −0.248 −0.379(0.530) (0.526) (0.336)

% White −0.000 −0.000 −0.002(0.955) (0.944) (0.511)

Middle school −0.156 −0.156 −0.140(0.387) (0.392) (0.470)

Enrollment 0.001 0.001 0.001(0.065) (0.066) (0.088)

Traditional indicators of teacher qualityTeaching experience 0.001 0.001

(0.645) (0.731)Education major −0.026 −0.053

(0.575) (0.280)Advanced degree −0.006 0.000

(1.410) (0.971)College selectivity −0.035 −0.046∗

(0.084) (0.039)Certification 0.005 −0.012

(0.954) (0.920)Instructional preferences of teachers

Mission −0.007(0.770)

Autonomy −0.044(0.150)

Innovation 0.030(0.227)

Instructional program 0.002(0.935)

Principal support 0.023(0.496)

Constant 3.544∗∗∗ 3.700∗∗∗ 3.807∗∗∗ 3.953∗∗∗

(0.000) (0.000) (0.000) (0.000)N 2315 2315 2315 1436

Note. p-values in parentheses.∗p < 0:05, ∗∗p < 0:01, ∗∗∗p < 0:001.

lower levels of instructional leadership than traditional public schools.Among charter schools, those affiliated with management type organiza-tions report more instructional leadership than nonaffiliated charter schools(at the ten percent level).

Model 2 builds upon Model 1 by introducing school-level variablesthat may account for leadership differences. Here we have included the


student-to-teacher ratio, the percent of students receiving free or reducedprice lunches, the percent of white students, a dummy variable representingmiddle schools, and total student enrollment. We note that the coefficient onCharter attenuates slightly from −0.556 to −0.419, and the significance leveldrops from the 0.01 level to the 0.05 level. Nonetheless, after consideringthese organizational factors significant differences between sectors remains.

Model 3 shows the impact of including five measures of traditionalteacher quality (teaching experience, having a major in education, advanceddegrees, college selectivity, or teacher certification). None of these teacherquality measures were significant predictors of principals’ instructional lead-ership and the coefficient on Charter maintained the same magnitude andsignificance as prior analyses. This suggests that, although these measuresof traditional teacher quality vary significantly across schooling sectors, theyare not related to sector-level differences in levels of principal instructionalleadership practices.

In the forth and final model we have included five measures of teacherpreferences that we hypothesized would influence principals’ instruc-tional leadership (alignment with school mission, preference for teachingautonomy and innovative instructional strategies, the coherence of theinstructional program, and the importance of principal support). Here wesee that none of the teacher preference measures are individually signifi-cant and the relationship between school sector and instructional leadershipremains substantively unchanged. With the exception of college selectivity(a coefficient which is statistically significant yet substantively irrelevant at−0.046, or an η effect size of 0.036), none of the teacher quality indicators orpreferences alter the relationship between school sector or charter affiliationon instructional leadership.5 In the next section we explore the potentialmechanisms that could produce these findings and discuss the implicationsand limitations of these results.

DISCUSSION

Existing research has documented notable differences between the teacherswho teach in charter schools as compared to teachers in traditional publicschools (e.g., Baker & Dickerson, 2006; Podgursky, 2007). It is possible thatdifferences in instructional leadership practices between and within school-ing sectors are a result of principals responding to their context, consistentwith situational and contingency theories (e.g., Blanchard, 1997; Hersey,Blanchard, & Johnson, 2001). Here we pose the question: Do teacher charac-teristics explain the differences in instructional leadership practices observedbetween traditional public and charter schools? We identify two domains ofteacher characteristics that are likely to influence principal leadership: tradi-tional, widespread measures of teacher quality, such as teaching experienceor advanced degrees; and teachers’ instructional preferences, such as how


important instructional autonomy or classroom innovation were to teacherswhen they accepted their teaching position. The regression results presentedin Table 4 show that there are significant differences in instructional lead-ership practices between charter and traditional public schools howeverteacher characteristics do not substantively explain this difference.

These results provide preliminary evidence that principals’ instructionalleadership practices are not associated with the composition of their faculty,and leads one to wonder why this may be the case. It may be that thedifferences in teacher characteristics between charter and traditional publicschools are significant, yet not sufficiently large to have a substantive impacton leadership practices. This study has the advantage of a respectably largesample size of more than 1,400 teachers and therefore has adequate powerto identify relatively small differences as statistically significant. The caveatis that not all such differences are meaningful. Take, for example, the differ-ence in teachers’ college selectivity from Table 1. Traditional public schoolshave a mean of 3.18 while charter schools have a mean of 3.06. From a theo-retical perspective, we may expect that teachers’ educational experience hasan impact on their behaviors and teaching practices, and perhaps revealssomething regarding their work ethic or personal expectations. However, itis unclear from a theoretical or empirical perspective how large this differ-ence must be before we expect it to influence principal behaviors. Principalsmay simply not be cuing into the undergraduate college experience of theirteachers.

The hypothesized relationship between teacher characteristics and prin-cipals’ instructional leadership practices implies an awareness of teachers’characteristics and preferences. Not only must the differences in teachermeasures be substantively large, the principals must notice the characteris-tics of the faculty and recognize that the faculty and school may be betterserved by implementing a different set of leadership practices. Research sug-gests that principals like to dedicate more time to instructional leadership orteacher observation; however, the day-to-day demands of school leadershipoften direct their time to more mundane tasks (Lortie, 2009; Reeves, 2003).If principals lack the time or inclinations to engage in such practices, evenmeaningfully large differences in teacher characteristics may exist betweenschools without notable differences in leadership practices. Simply put, prin-cipals must be able to evaluate what they know of themselves, the faculty,and the school to determine an appropriate leadership practice that alignswith the context of their school.

Additionally, principals must have the capacity to match their leadershippractices with their teachers’ preferences. There is reason to believe thatleadership practices may be more strongly tied to the individual than thecontext (Graeff, 1983). This is not to say that leadership is immutable, ratherthat tailoring one’s leadership to accommodate teachers’ characteristics andpractices would require a focused effort, possibly in conjunction with the


directed assistance of coaching, mentoring, or professional development.It may be that the findings of Lortie (2009) and Reeves (2003) mentionedabove are evidence that principals want to mold their leadership practicesaround teacher preferences yet lack the capacity to do so.

The above-mentioned considerations have focused on ways in whichteacher characteristics may shape the nature of principal leadership prac-tices. However, there are also methodological and psychometric considera-tions worth exploring that pertain to the results. The foremost methodolog-ical consideration is that the research design employed here is not testinga causal model, nor do we use quasi-experimental methods to approximatecausal effects. Thus it is possible that differences in instructional leadershippractices between schooling sectors is a manifestation of sorting on the partof school principals and/or school hiring committees or other unobservedfactors. It may be that principals who are inclined to exhibit more instruc-tional leadership practices select positions in traditional public schools, whileprincipals who are less inclined toward instructional leadership choose tolead charter schools. The selection phenomenon of principals to schools ingeneral is an understudied area and worthy of further attention.

From a psychometric perspective we must acknowledge the limita-tions of our 9-item instructional leadership scale, as compared to the morenuanced 71-item Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (Hallingerand Murphy, 1985) or the 72-item Vanderbilt Assessment for Leadership inEducation (Murphy et al., 2007). While we believe that our scale capturesthe core of instructional leadership, it cannot, for example, account for thedistribution of all instructional leadership throughout the faculty.6

The findings presented here, namely that principals’ instructionalleadership practices appear to be largely independent of their teachers’ char-acteristics and preferences, present several possibilities for future research.First, it would be beneficial to identify alternative aspects of charter and tra-ditional public schools that differ and may plausibly explain differences inprincipals’ leadership practices. A longitudinal study tracking principals asthey move between sectors or among schools, or encounter significant shiftsin faculty composition, would be best suited to examine whether instruc-tional leadership changes under these conditions and whether these changescorrespond to beneficial outcomes for students. To date we have limitedknowledge regarding situational leadership and how key contextual factorsmay induce certain leadership practices. Our research suggests that princi-pals do not exhibit differences in leadership in accordance with differencesin their faculty and moves us one step closer to understanding situationalleadership in general and charter school leadership specifically.

In sum, it appears as though instructional leadership practices are notrelated to faculty composition. Both researchers and practitioners can con-tribute to the discussion by clarifying the conditions under which we would


expect instructional leadership behaviors to be responsive to faculty compo-sition and explicating how specifically leadership practices can better alignwith the needs and experiences of teachers.

NOTES

1. One large EMO represents 18.6% of all charter schools (11 of 59) and 50% of the affiliatedcharter schools (11 of 22).

2. Before multiple imputation, we studied the behavior of the missing and non-missing values forthe selected variables. For the teacher file, there was always at least one teacher per school with a non-missing value for each one of the variables considered. The variables that had the greatest proportionof missing values overall and per school type (i.e. charter and traditional) were also identified. For theteacher file, practically all variables had missing-value proportions below 5%, suggesting that imputationwould have little effect on analysis results. The teacher variable with the greatest overall proportion ofmissing values was selectivity of college attended (7.34%). Because no patterns in missing data emerged,we operated under the assumption that the data were normally distributed and the missing data areMissing at Random (MAR). With both files having non-monotonous patterns of missing data, the MarkovChain Monte Carlo (MCMC) imputation method with a single chain and a non-informative prior was usedto create five imputations.

3. Teachers with probationary certification receive a value of 1 because this type of certificationis the initial credential issued after satisfying all requirements except the completion of a probationaryteaching period.

4. Although these items could be used as a single scale (alpha 0.73), we include them individuallyto avoid the assumption of equal weight in their potential contribution to instructional leadership. Thecorrelation between these items does not exceed 0.46; six of the ten correlations are less than 0.40.

5. As mentioned previously, the smaller number of respondents in Model 4 is a function of thesurvey design, where the questions soliciting teacher preferences were aimed at teachers with choicesamong possible schools. Therefore, Model 4 is not directly comparable to models 1–3, as it is restrictedto teachers who chose their teaching positions where as the other models include all teachers whoresponded to the survey. Repeating Model 3 using only the teachers who chose their current school ascompared to those who did not produces similar results. This suggests that teachers who were assignedto their schools or who had only one job offer do not differentially influence principal’s instructionalleadership compared to teachers who did choose their school. One difference between these groupsis that college selectivity was significant (−0.046∗) for teachers who chose among multiple schools; forteachers who did not have a choice, highest degree earned was significant (0.011∗∗∗). Neither of thesealtered the coefficients on Choice or Affiliation.

6. A related psychometric concern may be that instructional leadership practices are conflated withthe organizational context of the school. Specifically, our scale contains two items related to a principals’involvement in professional development. It may be that affiliated charters or some districts handleprofessional development directly and that this scale would represent schools in such organizationalcontexts as demonstrating less instructional leadership. Removing these two items from the instructionalleadership scale has no substantive impact on the results presented in Table 4.

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