Descriptive Evidence on School Leaders’ Prior Professional Experiences and Instructional Effectiveness

Despite empirical evidence suggesting the important influence school leaders have on learning conditions and student outcomes in schools, relatively little is understood about the professional pathways they take into their roles. In this descriptive paper, we document the professional experiences, personal characteristics and instructional effectiveness of Oregon’s principals and assistant principals between 2006 and 2019. We highlight the diversity of roles educators assume prior to entering school leadership. We find that school leaders who have prior teaching experience in tested grades and subjects do not raise student achievement at substantively or statistically meaningful higher rates than their peers. We document that female principals and assistant principals have become more representative of the teaching workforce, but that there have been almost no changes in the racial/ethnic composition of school leaders in Oregon. Finally, we observe minimal differences in female and non-White assistant principals’ time-to-entry into the principalship. Our findings provide insights on potential points of intervention during the educator career trajectory to attract and develop more effective and demographically representative school leaders. *We are grateful to the Oregon Department of Education for access to studentand staff-data; in particular, Brian Reeder, Amelia Vargas and Evan Fuller answered various data-related questions and gave substantive feedback. We thank Aliza Husain, Brendan Bartanen and participants at the 2020 AEFP Conference for their comments. All errors are our own. Correspondence regarding the paper can be sent to David Liebowitz at daviddl@uoregon.edu, Department of Educational Methodology, Policy and Leadership, 5267, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, 97403. 1 Professional pathways to school leadership School principals play a central role in promoting student learning and supporting teacher development. Despite methodological difficulties in measuring school leaders’ impact on student learning (Grissom et al., 2015; Chiang et al., 2016), credibly causal evidence suggests that principals are important factors in the variability of student learning gains (Branch et al., 2012; Coelli and Green, 2012; Dhuey and Smith, 2014), student attendance rates (Bartanen, 2020), and teacher working conditions (Burkhauser, 2017). However, much remains to be understood about principals’ professional pathways into the role, how they influence teacher, school and student outcomes, and how their influence might vary across different types of students and teachers (Liebowitz and Porter, 2019). For policy makers and educational system leaders interested in attracting and developing more effective and representative school leaders, it is critical to understand the professional experiences and personal characteristics of those who currently become assistant principals and principals.1 Despite the attractiveness of multi-faceted strategies to improve the pipeline of school leaders, in contexts of limited resources, system leaders would benefit from an understanding of potential high-leverage moments of intervention during the educator career trajectory. For instance, whether or not incoming principals have extensive administrative experience at the school building level has important implications for their pre-service training, induction and ongoing professional development. Similarly, the prior instructional effectiveness of school leaders may have implications for the development of current school leaders and the recruitment of future ones. In this brief descriptive paper, we study the professional pathways educators take into school leadership roles and how these interact with their personal characteristics and their prior instructional effectiveness. Leveraging comprehensive student and staff data from the state of Oregon between 2006-07 and 2018-19, we describe the sequence of professional positions educators hold prior to entering the principalship, their prior efficacy in improving students’ test score outcomes as teachers, and how entry into the principalship varies by educators’ observable characteristics. Most other empirical studies on school leadership have focused on different moments in the career trajectory than ours. A small, but growing, body of work examines the effects of universitybased (Grissom et al., 2019b) and alternative principal pre-service preparation programs (Clark et al., 2009; Corcoran et al., 2012; Gates et al., 2019a, 2014). Other work examines the benefits to experience in the principalship (Bartanen, 2019), the negative effects of principal turnover (Bartanen et al., 2019; Grissom and Bartanen, 2019), the sorting of principals to particular schools or communities (Grissom et al., 2019a; Loeb et al., 2010), and the labor market for practicing principals (Béteille et al., 2012; Cullen et al., 2016). Still others have evaluated comprehensive efforts to reform the identification, recruitment, selection, coaching and evaluation of principals (Gates et al., 2019b). Collectively, this evidence highlights the importance of designing preservice preparation, recruitment, selection and ongoing development of school leaders with an In this study, we use the term school leader to describe assistant principals and principals. When we examine these positions separately, we describe them by their specific titles.