Purpose: Effective styles of principal leadership can help address multiple issues in struggling schools, such as low student achievement and high rates of teacher attrition. Although the literature has nominated certain “idealized” leadership styles as being more or less effective, such as transformational, instructional, and shared instructional leadership, we have little evidence about how principals may or may not choose to practice these styles across U.S. schools. Research Design: Latent class analysis was used to identify different types of principals across the United States. We analyzed the 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey as it presents a unique opportunity to study the different types of U.S. principals since it contains leadership measures not found in other national surveys. A final sample of 7,650 public schools and principals was included in the analysis. Findings: Instead of idealized leadership styles signifying variations in practice, the differences between types of principals were defined by the degree of principal and teacher leadership. Further, the school and principal context, such as school size, urbanicity, accountability performance, and principal background, predicted the three significantly different principal types: controlling, frequent principal leadership; balkanizing, high degree of leadership shared with teachers; or integrating, frequent principal leadership as well as a high degree of leadership shared with teachers. Conclusions: These types suggest that principals simultaneously practice leadership behaviors associated with multiple leadership styles in accordance with their background and school context. These findings provide support for the use of more complex models to assess school leader effectiveness.

The purpose of this study is to review the literature on the most accurate indicators of students at risk of dropping out of high school. We used Relative Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to compare the sensitivity and specificity of 110 dropout flags across 36 studies. Our results indicate that 1) ROC analysis provides a means to compare the accuracy of different dropout indicators, 2) the majority of dropout flags to date have high precision yet lack accuracy, 3) longitudinal growth models provided the most accurate flags, while 4) the most accurate crosssectional flags examine low or failing grades. We provide recommendations for future policy and practice.

Transformational leadership by the principal appears to be a precondition of shared instructional leadership in schools, but it does not guarantee that principals and teachers will collaborate on curriculum and instruction. The present study, a content analysis of existing case studies, explores the ways in which teachers respond to transformational leadership by the principal, with attention paid to the influence and conditions that activate interdependent relationships and enhance shared transformational leadership and shared instructional leadership. A contrast school, where shared instructional leadership did not take hold, suggests that structures and processes that organize teachers’ work differently do not automatically result in the kinds of interactions associated with quality teaching and learning.

Regions of hypoxia are a hallmark of solid tumors. Tumor cells modulate the regulation of specific genes allowing adaptation and survival in the harsh hypoxic environment. We have identified SKIP3, a novel human kinase-like gene, which is overexpressed in multiple human tumors and is regulated by hypoxia. SKIP3 is an ortholog of the Drosophila tribbles, rat NIPK, dog C5FW, and human C8FW genes. Drosophila tribbles is involved in slowing cell-cycle progression during Drosophila development, but little is known regarding the function or tissue distribution of the vertebrate orthologs. We show that the normal tissue expression of SKIP3 is confined to human liver, while multiple primary human lung, colon, and breast tumors express high levels of SKIP3 transcript. Endogenous SKIP3 protein accumulates within 48 h under hypoxic growth conditions in HT-29 and PC-3 cells, with upregulation of the SKIP3 mRNA transcript by 72 h. We identified activating transcription factor 4 (ATF4) as a SKIP3-binding partner using the yeast-two-hybrid assay. Coexpression of SKIP3 and ATF4 showed that SKIP3 is associated with the proteolysis of ATF4, which can be blocked using a proteosome inhibitor. These results indicate that SKIP3 may be an important participant in tumor cell growth.

Historically, students who fail to graduate from secondary school are considered as a single category of school dropouts. However, emerging literature indicates that there may be multiple subgroups of high school dropouts, termed dropout typologies. The purpose of this study was to assess the extent to which different typologies of dropouts were present in a large national dataset, and to estimate the influence of the known covariates of dropping out on each of the subgroups. A growth mixture model was estimated using the ELS:2002 dataset and non-cumulative GPA during the first three semesters of high school. The model identified two main subgroups associated with dropping out which accounted for 24.6% of the sample but contained 91.8% of the dropouts.