Multimedia Reporting (Kuhr-Musser)

A new study suggests that school principals’ undergraduate background matters when it comes to the recruitment, selection and retention of teachers with strong academic undergraduate backgrounds, especially in high-poverty schools.

State and local officials have become concerned with improving the overall quality of the principal and teacher workforce and creating greater equity with respect to student demographics in that workforce.

Bruce Baker, an associate professor of teaching and leadership at the University of Kansas, and Bruce S. Cooper, a professor of educational leadership at Fordham University in New York, conducted a study of school principals and the hiring of teachers in schools, which was published in Educational Administration Quarterly.

Schools like the University of Kansas are classified as "selective" according to Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. Associate Bruce baker, who co-authored the research study, works at in the School of Education at KU.

“We hypothesized that school principals with certain attributes are likely to favor teachers with similar attributes to their own,” said Baker.

The study was conducted using the 1993 and 1994 Schools and Staffing Surveys, a product of the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, to test whether school administrators who attended more selective universities are more or less likely to hire teachers who attended more selective undergraduate institutions.

The study focused on principals’ undergraduate institutions rather than graduate institutions because more rigorous sorting occurs in undergraduate admissions compared to most graduate schools of education. The teachers’ undergraduate institutions were categorized according to data from the Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges.

“Assuming our hypothesis is upheld, a relatively straightforward leverage point for improving poor urban schools would be the recruitment of principals from more selective undergraduate backgrounds into urban settings with the greatest need and to support their efforts to hire teachers with similar college backgrounds,” Baker said.

Because education policy is concerned with ways to recruit high-quality teachers into schools serving high-poverty student populations, the study created separate models for high and low-poverty schools to determine whether the influence of principal background attributes on teacher attributes is stronger or weaker in higher-poverty conditions. High-poverty schools are those identified as being in the top quartile on a measure of percent poverty and lower poverty schools in the bottom quartile.

In reality, if principals’ academic backgrounds have a positive influence in high-poverty environments and little or no influence in low-poverty environments, then it may be more helpful for district administrators and state policy makers to support policies that allow transfer of principals with strong academic backgrounds to high-poverty schools.

The results of the study revealed that on average, about 12 percent of school teachers attended highly selective or the most competitive schools, but for high-poverty schools, this group represented less than 10 percent of teachers. In low-poverty areas, principals at schools with special programs were more likely to have attended highly selective colleges, and more than 15 percent of teachers at these schools had similar educational backgrounds.

Further results from the study show principals in high-poverty schools who attended highly or most selective undergraduate institutions were 3.3 times more likely to hire teachers who attended similar institutions. Across all schools, a principal who attended a highly or most selective college was 2.3 times more likely to hire teachers who similar colleges. Conceivably, principals with a more rigorous academic background might better understand the importance of such training.

In the end, the research shows that principals are key players in the school reform effort. The research gives further credit to the relationship between the background and qualities of the principal and the effectiveness of the teachers.

Previous methods of attracting high-quality teachers included using substantial wage premiums to recruit teachers that graduated from selective schools, but this study could change that. Perhaps using wage premiums to recruit principals with strong academic backgrounds may prove to be more efficient and less costly for school districts than large wage premiums for teachers.

Teachers and principals, in essence, are joined at the hip, and this research reaffirms the essential importance of a strong academic background for educators and the critical relationship between good leadership and classroom instruction.

The findings of this study also prove the importance of rigorous undergraduate preparation. The study suggests educational leadership programs would be wise to recruit candidates from more rigorous academic undergraduate institutions and pay more attention to test scores and other indicators of general intelligence.

Baker hopes further research will be done to see if teachers from high-end universities, acting as members of site-based hiring committees, are more likely to recommend the hiring of new colleagues who are also from more competitive, four-year colleges and universities.