The racial disparities in school discipline and lack of teacher diversity represent two pressing issues facing educational equity. While traditional measures of teacher quality center on experience and credentials, little extant literature situates teacher diversity as an aspect of teacher quality. To fill this gap, we explore how both teacher experience and racial diversity are associated with school-level student discipline outcomes, and how they vary by schools’ contextual factors. We find that while teacher diversity and experience predict both reductions in disciplinary incidents and consequences, only changes in the share of Black teachers a school employs are associated with reductions in the Black–White racial school discipline gap. We position our findings in the Diversity Intelligence and People as Technology frameworks and discuss implications for policy and educational human resources practices.
PurposeThis study tested a moderated mediation model of school leadership effects on teacher instructional practices. Specifically, the authors focused on the mediating effect of teacher professional communities and the moderating effect of instructional climate on the relationship between school leadership and teacher instructional practices.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected data from 958 teachers working in 72 middle and high schools in Türkiye and employed multilevel structural equation modelling (MSEM) with Bayesian estimation to predict structural links between the study variables.FindingsResults affirmed a full mediation model where school leadership practices exerted indirect effects on teacher instructional practices through promoting teacher professional communities. The authors also found significant moderating role of instructional climate in the effect of school leadership on teacher professional communities and instructional practices.Originality/valueThis study illuminates the contextualized nature of school leadership by concluding that the effect of school leadership on teacher professional communities and instructional practices is closely tied to the extent to which a high-quality instructional climate is established in schools.
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