Urban Literacy Leadership: Examining One Principal’s Vision and Practice: A Sociocultural Investigation of One Principal’s Practice

School leadership research offers prescriptions for strong instructional and culturally relevant leadership for diverse and urban adolescent populations, yet little evidence describes how school principals impact adolescents’ in-school reading experiences. This qualitative inquiry sought to understand how one urban secondary principal perceived and enacted his role in a school’s effort to teach reading. It also investigated how staff and students perceived his actions. Framed by sociocultural perspectives of reading and a distributed leadership perspective, data analysis revealed that the principal made time and nurtured relationships to grow teacher capacity, support and participate in independent reading, and attend to individual readers and teachers. This study affirms the importance of context in shaping urban adolescents’ reading experiences and raises implications for the urban school principal’s role in their literacy instruction.

Principals as Agents? Investigating Accountability in the Compensation and Performance of School Principals

Although school accountability incentives and standards, such as district-mandated goals and state sanctions for poor performance, are increasingly common, few studies have investigated their effectiveness. The author of this paper seeks evidence on whether such policies affect public secondary principal pay and school performance. An analysis of cross-sectional variation in data from the 1999–2000 Schools and Staffing Survey indicates that accountability policies coincided with lower college matriculation rates and lower principal pay, particularly for the best principals. On the other hand, the policies were associated with higher student retention rates at the worst schools. Though principals at those schools may not have been directly rewarded through accountability policies, these principals appear to have acted as agents for students in danger of dropping out.