Leadership IES

Systems Leadership in Middle Schools: A School Policy Intervention with Random Assignment (SLMS) ($4,492,432/5 years)

The purpose of the SLMS program is to improve academic outcomes for middle school students by providing professional development, coaching, and materials aimed at transforming the school organization, retaining teachers in highly challenged urban schools and increasing student achievement.

At the middle grades (6-8), the districts in Florida give parents the choice of enrolling their students in traditional, neighborhood middle schools, K-8 schools, or one of several magnet or charter options. The study proposed here will be conducted only in the traditional, neighborhood middle schools in three Florida districts, all of which serve grades 6-8. The student population in these schools is ethnically and linguistically diverse, and relatively high in poverty.

The SLMS program is built around a coherent set of professional development modules and school improvement benchmarks that are supplemented by sustained on-site facilitation by MRSH trainers. Program delivery occurs over a three-year period, involves the entire professional staff at a school (as well as to representatives from other stakeholder groups), and exemplifies the key principles of effective professional development.

This is a mixed methods design employing both survey and standard qualitative research strategies. We plan to collect four types of data: survey data, district administrative data, MRSH administrative data and qualitative data. We will use a number of well-established measures of school organization and instruction drawn from prior research; data analytic strategies appropriate for both “intent-to-treat” (ITT) analyses of project impact and for examining the effects of mediating and moderating variables; and the use of a qualitative data analysis software program, Atlas.ti, for interview, focus group and observational data.