The Influence Of Principal Leadership On Educational Outcomes Of Inner Cities Children

The Influence of Principal Leadership on Educational Outcomes of Inner-cities Children
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The Influence of Principal Leadership on Educational Outcomes of Inner-cities Children
Abstract
The role of principals faces a lot of challenges that seem to be increasing due to various school reforms that demand accountability in the field of education. In the professional of school principals, those from high-risk schools find the ever-increasing challenges facing them more overwhelming. Inner-city school principals face the challenges of providing learning opportunities for the vulnerable and needy children and create a learning environment for these needy children to achieve their outcomes. The available literature has ignored the experiences of inner-city school principals and the few studies that have focused on the role of principal leadership in advantaged schools. This study attempts to explore the realities of inner-city schools by establishing the role of principal leadership on children educational outcomes.
Introduction
The quality of education offered in schools depends on the internal processes work of the involved stakeholders to improve the performance of children. One of the processes is leadership whose basic purpose is to ensure that things are done in a manner that benefits the majority. In schools, instructional leadership portrays the school principal as the central figure whose responsibility is to ensure that the school staff and community are working towards the mission and vision of the school. The school principal all the activities of the school from management to curriculum management and ensures that there is professional development for the teachers to promote best practice. Additionally, the principal has the responsibility of monitoring student progress to establish the needs of their needs and where changes need to be done to improve their performance. Besides these, the principal is mandated to ensure that a positive learning environment is created. However, the general school administration and the role of principals is always questioned. According to Murphy (2002):
For some time now, the (education) profession has been marked by considerable ferment as it has struggled to locate itself in a post behavioral science era. During this era of turmoil, the historical foundations of the profession have been thrown into question, especially the legitimacy of the knowledge base supporting school administration and the appropriateness of programs for preparing school leaders.
Leadership is an evolving concept in all platforms, and those who aspire to be good leaders need to understand it, be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, adopt the best practice that will enable them to provide their best to their followers.
Various scholars have provided a range of theories aimed at helping people to understand the whole concept of leadership. Most of these theories encompass a wide range of features from the industrial period to the current dynamic political, educational and business perspectives of this era. For the past three decades, there have been some studies on the role of instructional leadership in the field of education from various scholars (such as Andrews & Soder, 1987; Dwyer, 1985; Leithwood & Montgomery, 1982). However, despite the efforts of these great scholars to develop theoretical frameworks and attempts to define leadership for education field, the definition of instructional leadership has been the major focus for the last two decades. The works of Leithwood and Steinchbach (1993), focused on total quality leadership that incorporates transformational leadership which has been the base of the role of leadership in education since early 2000.
In his work Krug (1992), asserts that instructional leadership combines five dimensions of the role of the principal: "defining the mission, managing curriculum and instruction, supervising and supporting teaching, monitoring student progress and promoting instructional climate." These dimensions of instructional leadership are defined as follows; defining mission the setting the purpose, mission, and objectives of the schools to help in decision making. Managing curriculum and instruction involves designing programs and curriculums to ensure there is coherency. Supervising and supporting teaching involves ensuring that there is a professional development that satisfies the needs of the learners. Additionally, it involves ensuring that there is enough human capital in the school. Monitoring student progress involves the interpretation and assessment of the students' outcomes to design a teacher instruction curriculum that satisfies the needs of the students. Promoting instructional climate involves developing a conducive learning environment. In addition to explaining these dimensions, Krug provided empirical evidence that demonstrates a direct correlation between them and student outcomes.
Problem Statement
The role of leadership continues to bring ever-increasing challenges to schools demanding accountability and reforms continue to be debated in the education field. Principals in disadvantaged and high-risk schools find these challenges more overwhelming. Principals in inner-city are some of the principals who have found these challenges to be overwhelming with the demands from various authorities and involved parties to provide a learning environment for the vulnerable and needy students in the order they can achieve more. These challenges appear to be insurmountable considering the critical issues affecting inner-community children, yet principals are struggling to ensure that the outcomes of these children regarding education are met. The available literature ignores these critical issues that inner-city school principals face. However, few studies have attempted to address the support these principals need.
Purpose of the paper
This paper attempts to demonstrate the correlation between principal leadership and student achievement. Additionally, it attempts to provide a deeper understanding of instructional leadership. This study is to provide a better understanding of the realities of inner-school principal leadership, the support they need as well as the initiatives that are necessary for the principals to influence student outcomes. Therefore, the primary purpose of this study is to explore the role of principal leadership in inner-school cities. To establish the role and necessary support, the principals gave their views as well as their teachers rated them based on leadership behaviors.
Research Question
The general focus of this study will be to explore the role of the principal in adopting the instructional according to Krug (1992) and transformational according to Bass and Avolio (1995) leadership models in the field of education and measure their influence on student outcomes. Therefore, this study will be guided by the question, "What is the influence of principal leadership on student outcomes?"
Limitations
The study will expect a lot of problems starting with the time limit. The time provides for this study might not be enough to conduct an extensive exploration of the topic. Secondly, the available research will limit the study since there is no enough literature on transactional in a combination of transformational leadership in education. Therefore, it will be hard to establish the correlation between principal leadership and student outcome. Gall, Gall, and Borg (2005). Asserted that:
It is difficult to make inferences about cause and effect from results of a correlational study. When variables A and B are correlated, researchers cannot definitively conclude that A caused B, that B caused A, or both A and B are caused by some third variable, C. (p. 220).
LITERATURE REVIEW
This review of the literature provides an examination of earlier studies that have attempted to explain the concept of transactional and transformational leadership and how it affects the outcomes of students in education. The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of principals who exhibit good leadership behaviors of the two-leadership construct contribute to academic achievements of their students. To explore this, it is essential to understand the nature of the roles of principals and how leadership behaviors contribute to student outcomes.
The study will consider the background of transactional leadership that was established by Hallinger and Murphy (1985), who was selected to design a study that measured the instructional management behavior regarding the definition of school mission, management of the instructional programs, and promotion of a conducive learning environment. In this study, Hallinger and Murphy utilized the Principal Instructional Management Rating Scale (PIMRS) that was developed by Hallinger in 1982 was used. The PIMRS tool consists 71 items that are supposed to be answered by principals and teachers. The results of this study provided a correlation between the instructional management and instructional leadership. However, their suggestion that instructional management and instructional leadership appears synonymously indicates that they do not distinguish between leadership and management. This poses a question whether this tool will foster a better understanding of leadership in the field of education. Additionally, there have been various issues surrounding this instrument. There is not enough knowledge on how the instrument handles the differences that arise from school size, demographic factors, gender or age. However, although the researchers provided evidence from ten subscales that proved that the instrument is reliable and valid, they give credit to Krug's criticism by asserting:
"… the absence of the outcome data limited our liability to test the external validity the instructional lead...