Secondary Education Principals/Superintendents
OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to investigate if and to what extent principal’s exemplary leadership practices correlate with the school climate as perceived by teachers in the Title I high schools of a school district in Georgia. METHODOLOGY The teachers of all 18 Title I high schools in one of the public school districts of the state of Georgia were the target population; with five schools participating in the study. Teachers (N=197; 16% response rate) completed the LPI-Observer survey and the Georgia School Personnel Survey (GSPS). There were 80 men and 117 women in the sample, with 114 having 0-10 years of school work experience and 83 with 11 or more years of experience. Most were African-American (64%). Internal reliability coefficients in this study were .99 for the overall LPI and .94 Model, .94 Inspire, .94 Challenge, .94 Enable, and .95 Encourage.
KEY FINDINGS Enable was the leadership practice seen as most used by their principals, followed by Inspire, Encourage and Model, and then Challenge. Spearman’s Rho (correlation coefficients) between each of the five leadership practices and school climate (GSPS) were all significant and indicated a large effect size (r ranged between .51 and .58). The author concludes:
This study concluded that there is a correlation between the exemplary leadership practices of the principals of the Title I high schools and the school climate. The school climate is one of the correlates on an effective school (Lezotte, 2001) So the result of the study contributed to the knowledge base of the literature on how the leadership practices of the principals could lead to a better school climate to enhance the students’ educational outcome in the Title I high schools. The findings from this study could be used for the organizational development and transformation. The result could also help develop and enhance instructional leadership training programs especially for the Title I schools (p. 157).