EdLeader Podcast - Measuring the Impact of Effective Principals featuring Dr. Anna Egalite

 

EdLeader Episode 2_12 Graphic

In the latest episode of EdLeader, Dr. Jackson sits down with Dr. Anna Egalite, coauthor of the recently released Wallace Foundation Report, "How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research." The researchers found that "an effective principal’s impact is stronger and broader than previously thought, making it “difficult to envision” a higher return on investment in K-12 education than the cultivation of high-quality school leadership, according to this research synthesis."

Dr. Anna Egalite has once again been ranked by Education Week’s 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings as one of the Top 200 education scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy in 2020. This is the second year that Dr. Egalite has earned this ranking. She was selected from a pool of more than 20,000 qualified scholars to be ranked among the Top 200. 

A native of Ireland, Dr. Anna Egalite is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development in the College of Education at North Carolina State University. She holds a Ph.D. in Education Policy from the University of Arkansas, a master's degree in elementary education from the University of Notre Dame, and a bachelor's degree in elementary education and history from St. Patrick's College in Dublin, Ireland. She completed her postdoctoral fellowship in the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. In fall 2017, she served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Duke University.

Her research focuses on the evaluation of education policies and programs intended to close racial and economic achievement gaps. Her studies have examined school choice policy, school size, the influence of family background on intergenerational economic mobility, and the diversification of the teacher labor force. In 2015, she was the recipient of the University of Notre Dame’s Michael Pressley Award for a Promising Scholar in the Education Field, and in 2017, the College of Education and Health Professions at the University of Arkansas awarded her the Outstanding Young Alumni Award. She has served as Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on grants totaling over six million dollars. Egalite’s scholarly articles have appeared in the journals Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, and Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis. Her research has been featured in a number of mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and The Atlantic.

Summary of Key Findings - How Principals Affect Students and Schools

1. Effective principals are at least as important for student achievement as previous reports have concluded—and in fact, their importance may not have been stated strongly enough.

2. Principals have substantively important effects that extend beyond student achievement.

3. Effective principals orient their practice toward instructionally-focused interactions with teachers, building a productive school climate, facilitating collaboration and professional learning communities, and strategic personnel and resource management processes.

4. Principals must develop an equity lens, particularly as they are called on to meet the needs of growing numbers of marginalized students.

5. Effective principals are not equitably distributed across schools.

6. Principals are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, but representation gaps with students are growing, which is concerning, given the payoffs to principal diversity.

7. Research on school principals is highly variable, and the field requires new investment in a rigorous, cohesive body of research. (as summarized by the NCDPI Weekly Top Ten)

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

How Principals Affect Students and Schools: A Systematic Synthesis of Two Decades of Research by Dr. Jason A. Grissom, Vanderbilt University; Dr. Anna J. Egalite, North Carolina State University; and Dr. Constance A. Lindsay, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Associate Professor Anna Egalite Ranked Among Education Week’s Top 200 Scholars Who had the Biggest Influence on Educational Practice and Policy in 2020 by Janine Bowen


Comments

  1. Principals’ influence on student outcomes may be second to that of teachers, but principals play a critical role in influencing how teachers learn to improve their instructional techniques. When teachers pull in the same direction as the principal, good things happen for students. The
    responsibility for learning and leading within the network is shared by all members through their dispositions and interactions, though formal leaders must arrange for the rounds to occur. Principals primarily influenced student learning by fostering strong learning climates in their schools. I am deeply touched by the "fostering strong learning climates" to lay the foundations for stronger schools.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment