Surveys

We developed surveys for principals, assistant principals, and teachers in order to better understand the role of school leaders. All three of these surveys asks about the instructional climate of their schools, the role of the school principal, how appealing different aspects of the principalship are to them, how leadership responsibilities are distributed between themselves and other school leaders, and their preferences for different school characteristics. The principal survey specifically asks how effective they feel as a school leader, and their pathway to the principalship. In parallel to the principal survey, the assistant principal and teacher surveys asks about the effectiveness of their principal as a school leader, and their future plans.

We use teachers' survey responses to develop a measure of teacher satisfaction to augment the teacher turnover measure described above. The combination of the two serves as one of our key school outcome variables. Responses are linked to a unique individual identifier so that we can follow the respondents over time with future surveys, and the surveys are confidential but not anonymous so that we can link the responses to the district administrative datasets described above. Additionally, because parallel items are used for the assistant principal and teacher surveys, this study design allows for the calculation of inter-rater reliabilities within schools. Triangulating responses of principals, assistant principals and teachers also allows us to create school-level measures of aggregate school leadership capacity as it is distributed across school actors. This operationalization of school leadership capacity allows us to examine the relationship between this capacity and other school outcomes.