Leadership and School Improvement in Context. A Systematic Comparative Analysis of North Rhine-Westfalia and California

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The findings from the mostly American school improvement research point to the central relevance of leadership for successful school improvement. This is especially true for schools with an increased improvement need, either because of their poor achievement results or because of unfavorable organizational conditions (e.g., collaboration, school climate). This is very often the case in schools serving disadvantaged communities (SSDC), which are located in socially and ethnically segregated areas and are faced with challenging external and internal contingency factors as a results of a high amount of students from socially disadvantaged families. So far, however, there is only little evidence on the extent to which these findings can also be applied to leadership in schools in Germany. The research project Leadership and School Improvement in Context therefore analyzes the roles, interdependencies, and leadership activities of principals in highly successful SSDC in North Rhine-Westfalia (NRW) and California. In the first part oft he project, which was carried out during a DFG research fellowship, the focus was on principals in California. The second part that is being introduced here will focus on leadership activities of principals in NRW and on the juxtaposition and comparison of the results from both studies.The 24-month study in NRW consists of two parts. In the first part, the study will analyze six highly successful and six averagely performing SSDC using a quantitative survey that includes scales asking for leadership and organizational characteristics of the school as well as a network analysis. In the second part, two of the highly successful and two oft he averagely successful schools go through an in-depth analysis. For this purpose, the principals are observed, and principals, vice principals, teachers, and administrative personnel are interviewed.The goal is to describe differences in the institutional frame and the internal and external contingency factors of SSDC in Germany and the USA that are relevant for the actions of principals, and to derive hypotheses about whether the models developed in North America can be transferred to the German situation.