Study: Effective Principals Embrace Collective Leadership

An expansive study devoted to examining the traits of effective school principals has found that high student achievement is linked to “collective leadership”: the combined influence of educators, parents, and others on school decisions.

Effective principals encourage others to join in the decision-making process in their schools, said the study, which was commissioned by the New York-based Wallace Foundation and produced by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement , in St. Paul, and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

Successfully done, the study suggested, such power sharing does not mean...