Understanding differences in perceptions of effective urban elementary school principals among various educational stakeholders

2012-03-20Principals are being asked to lead students to unprecedented levels of academic success, but with increasingly less power or resources to their avail. Moreover, principals must interact with countless stakeholders in education. While much research has studied the general characteristics of what many believe constitute an effective principal, little has been done to research job-specific characteristics, or the similarities and differences that might exist in the perceptions of these characteristics between the various educational stakeholders who principals interact with. ❧ This study consisted of three research questions looking to study the similarities and differences in the perceptions of job-specific skills related to being an effective elementary school principal in an urban setting. This study utilized a mixed-methods approach to research, with four instruments used to collect data from 51 superintendents, 114 principals, and 101 teachers. ❧ This study resulted in numerous key findings. While similarities were discovered in a few of the 10 domains of job-specific characteristics, there were far more differences. Many of these differences occurred between stakeholder groups. More importantly, however, several key differences were found within the same stakeholder groups, and within the same characteristic domains. This suggests that educators were not able to keep a consistent opinion towards the same characteristic across multiple instruments