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Charts: Instructional Leadership

To see how principals go about their work, the Education Week Research Center analyzed data from the federal 1999-2000 Schools and Staffing Survey. The nationally representative survey includes the responses of 9,893 public school principals and 56,354 public school teachers. School leaders say they engage in management-related activities such as ensuring security and attending to the school building far more often than they provide instructional leadership. They also are much less likely to have discretion over how to spend their school's budget and how to train staff members than over student discipline and teacher hiring. Less than half the teachers said their principals often talk...