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Purpose: Over the past years “leadership for learning” (LFL) has become popular among educational scholars. LFL refers to the idea that effective leaders demonstrate a contextually contingent mix of instructional, transformational, and shared leadership practices that may have differential effects at various organizational levels. These assumptions have rarely been investigated within a coherent empirical design. We examine the shared and differential effects of LFL on teachers’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment, which are relevant antecedents for learning, improvement, and change on all levels of a school. Method: Drawing on survey data ( nteachers = 3,746, nschools = 126) from Germany and on well-established instruments like the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire or Teaching and Learning International Survey, multilevel associations of LFL and teachers’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment were explored. This was done by applying doubly latent structural equation models. Findings: Our results indicate that (1) it is statistically necessary to model perceived leadership practices as a multilevel construct, (2) shared leadership is a strong predictor of individual and shared job satisfaction and organizational commitment of teachers whereas (3) individual consideration only shows significant associations on the individual level (4) that LFL is contextually sensitive. Implications for Research and Practice: Findings make a strong case for studying LFL within a multilevel framework and also for applying complex study and analytical designs, which should take the complexity of the theoretical assumptions into consideration all the way along from questionnaire design, through the process of data collection up to the point of data analysis.

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This article explores the mechanisms of educational pathway decision making at the transition from primary to secondary school in the German education system by analysing data from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The highly reliable data of the German sample of the 2001 PIRLS make it possible to take into consideration simultaneously students' cognitive abilities at the end of primary schooling, criteria for parental decision making in education, as well as institutional adjustment options of family education strategies, in order to describe the complex mechanisms of educational pathway decision making. First, a general overview of the German education system and a review of the current state of research concerning the issue of social inequality of education in Germany are given. Subsequently, a theoretical background seeking to answer the question of how educational disparities arise and how they are structured, as well as a model for analysing parental choices in education are presented. After hypothesizing, multifarious statistical analyses are conducted with the aim of proving these assumptions and demonstrating how complex the mechanisms of educational segregation in Germany are. The results demonstrate that all participants in the process of decision making take a more or less socially biased achievement criterion as a basis and, thus, the logic of meritocracy does not seem to be an appropriate idea for segregating students into different branches of education at the end of primary schooling.