School leadership and school organization: investigating their effects on school improvement in reading and math

Abstract

In this study, we explore patterns of improvement among a large set of elementary schools over four years. We use as a starting point the premise that school improvement, by definition, entails a change in the state of the organization over some period of time. We first examine whether changes in school leadership and school organizational processes impact growth in student reading and math outcomes. We next identify four latent classes of schools with contrasting growth trajectories and determine whether or not these empirically-derived latent classes are associated with differences in schools’ contextual conditions and specific malleable school leadership and school organization constructs. Our results provide some initial steps that link these different achievement classifications to varied patterns of school leadership and school organization practices.