Leadership Styles and High-Stakes Testing

Abstract

High-stakes testing has become a mainstay of educational policy making, with researchers and theorists across the country offering insight into two major questions around the initiatives: How do teachers change their classrooms to support student performance on the tests? How do students fare under new high-stakes accountability? Little work has examined the role that principals play in mediating the context of high-stakes testing. Rather than seeing principals as middle management for the system’s accountability practices, this article offers a typology of a spectrum of school leadership styles across four matched pairs of schools withinthe same high-stakes testing environment, examining the role leadership played during the course of a decade in framing how schools would respond to the testing environment. Principals’ philosophies about their staff and roles as leaders were reflective of teachers’ approaches to instructional changes and were also related to schools’ long-term achievement gains.