Background: Using meta-analytic review techniques, this study synthesized the results of 79 unpublished studies about the nature of transformational school leadership (TSL) and its impact on the school organization, teachers, and students. This corpus of research associates TSL with 11 specific leadership practices. These practices, as a whole, have moderate positive effects on a wide range of consequential school conditions. They also have moderately strong and positive effects on individual teachers' internal states, followed by their influence on teacher behaviors and collective teachers' internal states. TSL has small but significant positive effects on student achievement. Research Design: This synthesis of unpublished research results is accomplished by a systematic series of meta-correlations and is compared with the results of earlier systematic reviews of published TSL research. Findings: Among the conclusions arising from the study is that several of the most widely advocated models of effective educational leadership actually include many of the same practices. Conclusions: More attention by researchers, practitioners, and researchers needs to be devoted to the impact of specific leadership practices and less to leadership models.

Purpose: This study tested a set of variables mediating school leadership’s influence on students referred to as “The four paths model.” Each path in the model includes variables with significant direct effects on student learning and which are malleable to practices included in an integrated model of effective school leadership. Research Design: Evidence for the study were responses to a survey by 1,779 teachers in 81 Texas elementary schools about the status of school leadership and all 13 variables on the four paths. Student achievement data were provided by results of state tests combining all subjects and all grades, while the count and percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch was used to estimate socioeconomic status. Confirmatory factor analysis, regression analysis, and structural equation modeling were used to analyze the data. Findings: Results uncovered a more nuanced and complex set of relationships among the four paths and their component variables than was specified in the original version of the model. School leadership significantly influenced student learning only through variables on one path, while variables on the other three paths influenced student learning only through their contribution to variables on that one path. Conclusions: Results point to the value of future research about the relationships among variables on the four paths, as well as efforts to identify latent variables among the observed variables in the study. Results of the study can be used by school leaders to more productively focus their school improvement efforts.

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This study reviews evidence about the overall influence of direction-setting leadership practices (DSLPs), 1 of 4 major categories of practices included in a widely known conception of effective leadership (e.g., Leithwood & Louis, 2011) and a focus of many other such conceptions, as well. This study also inquires about how directionsetting practices influence distal organizational outcomes, including student achievement, conceiving of such influence as traveling along (or influencing variables on) 4 "paths". Standard meta-analysis, narrative review, and effect size summation and averaging were applied on 110 studies involved in this review. The findings of this study, as one in a related series of investigations, inform the further development of a model of successful school leadership practices.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of nine district characteristics on student achievement, explored the conditions that mediated the effects of such characteristics and contributed to understandings about the role school-level leaders play in district efforts to improve achievement. Design/methodology/approach Data for the study were provided by the responses of 2,324 school and district leaders in 45 school districts to two surveys. Student achievement evidence was provided by multi-grade provincial measures of math and language achievement. The analysis of these data included calculation of descriptive statistics, confirmatory factor analysis and regression mediation analysis. Findings Seven of nine district characteristics contributed significantly to student achievement and three conditions served as especially powerful mediators of such district effects. The same three conditions, as well as others, acted as significant mediators of school-level leader effects on achievement, as well. Practical implications District characteristics tested in the study provide a powerful framework for guiding the district improvement work of senior educational leaders. The organizational improvement efforts of both district and school leaders would be substantially enhanced by a better understanding of how to diagnose and improve the status of those conditions acting as significant mediators of the effects of both district and school leadership on student achievement. Originality/value This is one of a very few large-scale quantitative studies examining the extent to which characteristics frequently identified by district effectiveness research explain variation in student learning. It is also one of the very few studies identifying classroom, school and family variables that mediate district effects on such learning. The study also adds to a growing body of evidence about variables which mediate school leaders’ effects on such learning.