School leadership and organizational factors: evaluating pathways to student learning

Abstract

Research on school leadership has proposed that the influence of leaders on student outcomes is largely indirect—through their work in supporting and developing school organizational processes such as a school's learning climate. Studies examining these indirect influences using mediational models typically find small effects of leadership on student learning outcomes. However, they do not further evaluate sub-sections of leadership pathways to understand which specific components cause overall leadership effects to be small. In this study, we review survey and administrative data from a large urban school district to compare different sections of mediational pathways from leadership to learning via organizational processes. We find that for all organizational processes that are theoretically expected to be influenced by school leadership, the correlations between those processes and school leadership are statistically significant. However, when examining the subsequent links connecting organizational processes to teaching/learning, most correlations are not statistically significant; only the pathway from learning climate to student learning is statistically significant. Therefore, most organizational processes that are theoretically expected to influence student learning are not significantly correlated with achievement. A review of recent mediational school leadership studies also reveals that in the majority of empirically tested mediational pathways, the relationships between leadership and the mediating organizational factors are stronger than the subsequent relationships between those factors and student outcomes. We discuss the implications of these findings for researchers and practitioners.