The Wallace Foundation Resources

States can pull a number of policy levers to help school districts develop, support and maintain a large corps of effective school principals.

Looking Inside and Across 33 leading SEL Programs: A Practical Resource for Schools and OST Providers; Revised and Expanded 2nd Edition (Preschool and Elementary Focus)​​​

The number of assistant principals has grown markedly in recent years, and with reconsideration, the AP role could do more to help foster educational equity, school improvement and principal effectiveness.

Long-term study of summer learning programs finds meaningful benefits over multiple years.

Teachers are confident they can help build students’ social-emotional skills, but say they could use more support to do so, according to a RAND survey.

To improve leadership of their schools, seven states have pulled a number of policy levers, from updating principal job standards to changing administrator licensing.

The Principal Supervisor Initiative succeeded in changing the supervisor position so that it centered on developing and evaluating principals to help them promote effective teaching and learning in their schools.

Six school districts working to focus the principal supervisor job on boosting principals’ instructional leadership were more likely than other districts to set up structures, such as dedicated training, to support the new role.

Large school districts nationwide are redesigning the principal supervisor job to focus more on principal support.

This report reveals findings from a first-of-its-kind national survey on effective school leadership as it relates to improving education and using a comprehensive principal pipeline.

This report, co-authored by the RAND Corporation, focuses on summer learning policy in the time of the pandemic.

This study finds that district leaders are pleased with the results of their ongoing principal pipelines.

This report examines the expenditures of six large school districts, all participants in a Wallace Foundation initiative, as they built and operated principal pipelines. Among the chief findings: The cost represented a very small slice of annual district spending—an average of about $5.6 million annually for the districts, or about 0.4 percent of their local annual expenditures.

How can school districts build a pipeline of effective school principals? This updated Wallace Perspective summarizes lessons learned about pipelines over the course of the initiative. It describes the four components of the pipelines: job standards for principals, high-quality pre-service training, rigorous hiring procedures, and tightly aligned on-the-job performance evaluation and support.

A look at data systems to improve school leadership offers hard-won insights gathered from six school districts that are building these systems to assist in everything from principal hiring to principal training.

The RAND Corporation conducted a synthesis of the evidence base on school-leadership interventions to better inform the rollout of those interventions under ESSA. This report is intended to help federal, state, and district education policymakers understand and implement school-leadership improvement efforts that are consistent with ESSA.

This report is the last in a series of studies examining the implementation of Wallace’s Principal Pipeline Initiative. In 2011, six large school districts each set out to develop a large corps of highly qualified school principals. After five years, according to this report, they have much to show for their efforts, having succeeded in putting into place four key components of a pipeline to the principalship.

Principals can make a big difference in the quality of the education students receive. That statement is not just a platitude. Research over the past decade or so has established that school leadership is second only to teaching among school-related influences on student learning, accounting for about one quarter of total school effects.

The largest study of summer learning finds that students with high attendance in free, five- to six-week, voluntary summer learning programs experienced educationally meaningful benefits in math and reading.

Intended for state officials involved in the assessment and approval of university and other programs to train future school principals, this report describes five design principles for effective program evaluation. The report also describes how two states, Illinois and Delaware, have approached evaluation, and provides a tool from its model-development work, an assessment that states can use to determine their degree of readiness for building a stronger system to evaluate principal preparation programs.

What is the state of university-based principal preparation programs? How are these essential training grounds of future school leaders viewed—by themselves as well as by the school districts that hire their graduates? Do the programs need to improve? If so, by what means? This publication seeks to help answer those questions by bringing together findings from four reports commissioned by The Wallace Foundation to inform its development of a potential new initiative regarding university-based principal training.

This report is the fourth in a series of studies examining six districts’ experiences in The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative, a six-year effort designed to help these districts build larger pools of strong principals and then study the results. It explores the districts’ work to change their approach to principal performance evaluation so that it focuses on working with principals, especially novices, to grow into their jobs and concentrate on improving teaching and learning in their classrooms.

School leadership is second only to teaching among school influences on student success, according to research. What can a school district do to produce a large and steady supply of top-notch school principals—and support their effective supervision? This Wallace Update describes two related Wallace Foundation initiatives seeking answers to that question.

School principals are “invaluable multipliers of teaching and learning in the nation’s schools,” according to this report by political scientist Paul Manna, but to date it’s been unclear what state policymakers could do to boost their effectiveness. Drawing from sources including the experiences of states that have focused on developing stronger principal policy, this report aims to fill that gap by offering guidance in the form of three sets of considerations for those who want to take action.

Describes the School Administration Manager (SAM) process, an approach that about 700 schools around the nation are using to direct more of principals’ time and effort to improve teaching and learning in classrooms. Principals often find themselves mired in matters of day-to-day administration and have little time to cultivate better teaching. The SAM process is designed to free up principals’ time so they can focus on improving instruction in classrooms.

This report finds the SAM process could be replicated in a large enough number of schools, with enough fidelity to a theoretical model, that a randomized controlled trial would be a meaningful test of its impact.

This report includes 10 appendices referred to in the first two volumes of the series.

Look at what six districts are doing to create new principal pipelines that are grounded in strong leadership standards, pre-service training, selective hiring procedures, and on-the-job evaluation and support. This first report of an ongoing evaluation of The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative describes the six participating school districts’ plans and activities during the first year of their grants. The evaluation, conducted by Policy Studies Associates and the RAND Corporation, is intended to inform policymakers and practitioners about the process of carrying out new policies and practices for school leadership.

This report reveals that all six participating districts in the Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline initiative have partnered with external programs for leader preparation. Meanwhile, novice leaders are supported by coaches—and those coaches, mentors, and supervisors all get assistance to build their capacity. This is the second report in an ongoing series that evaluates the activities of participating districts in the foundation’s initiative.

This report focuses on implementation of all components of the initiative as of 2014 and its four interrelated areas of district policy and practice: leader standards, preservice preparation, selective hiring and placement, and evaluation and support. This is the third report tracing the activities of six districts that agreed to adopt and implement the Wallace Foundation’s initiative-specific approaches to improve school leader recruitment and retention.

This report adds to existing resources for superintendents to provide support for new principals. The three tools designed by education researchers at the University of Washington are meant to help. Two focus on the redesign of central offices in ways that foster effective leadership in schools. The last is an aid for principal supervisors seeking to develop the instructional capabilities of the principals they oversee. Download the full report here.

Corcoran et al. look at the six districts participating in The Wallace Foundation’s Principal Pipeline Initiative. Part I presents a description of the organizational structure and general features of the various principal supervisory systems, including the roles, selection, staffing, professional development, and evaluation of principal supervisors, as well as the preparation, selection, support, and evaluation of principals. Part II provides recommendations for building more effective principal supervisors. Based on the survey results and observations from the site visits, these recommendations identify those structures and practices that are most likelyto result in stronger school leaders and higher student achievement.

The Wallace Foundation distills insights from school leadership projects and major studies supported by the foundation since 2000 to highlight key district actions to boost school leadership, including drawing up meaningful job descriptions and mentoring novice principals.

This Wallace Perspective summarizes a decade of foundation research and work in school leadership to identify what it is that effective school principals do. It concludes that they carry out five key actions particularly well, including shaping a vision of academic success for all students and cultivating leadership in others.

This report draws on a decade of work by the Wallace Foundation and identifies ways that preservice and in-service training can be enhanced to further develop strong leadership in every school. This report focuses on candidate selection, emphasizing instructional leadership—and including high-quality mentoring and individualized professional development.

This Wallace Foundation report shows that leadership is second only to teaching among school influences on student success, and its impact is greatest in schools with the greatest need, according to this landmark examination of the evidence on school leadership.