Succeeding Against the Odds: Understanding resilience and exceptionalism in high-functioning township and rural primary schools in South Africa

本研究的目的是了解南非高功能乡镇和农村小学的弹性和例外主义。之前的研究表明，这些学校的成功背后的很大一部分原因是教师，尤其是校长的领导和管理实践。尽管学校领导和管理（SLM）对学生成绩的关键作用几乎被普遍接受，但这些实践的准确定量指标仍然难以捉摸。简而言之，我们目前没有适当的调查问卷，可以准确地捕捉发展中国家具有挑战性背景的学校的领导和管理实践。造成这种情况的原因之一是，这些文书的设计主要考虑到发达国家的情况，而没有考虑到发展中国家普遍存在的可能性和具有挑战性的情况下的典型可能性。此外，在大规模的定量研究中，现有的SLM措施以肤浅和碎片化的方式捕捉有效或无效的SLM实践。当研究现有的教育成就定量模型时，研究人员经常发现，尽管控制了学校资源和各种学生家庭背景因素，但仍有很大的无法解释的成分。这在具有挑战性的环境中尤其如此，因为资源和结果之间的脱节似乎是最大的。对这种缺乏解释力的一个尝试性解释是，我们目前没有捕捉到这些学校中真正的领导和管理实践（或缺乏），这部分是由于不适当和不充分的SLM工具造成的。这是该研究具有跨学科性质的第一个动机；经济学和教育学为学校领导和管理的问题提供了不同但互补的视角。我们之前对南非贫困学校的研究表明，通过对具有相似人口和地理特征的成对学校进行比较，可以获得更深入的见解，其中一所表现较差，另一所表现良好。下面将简要讨论这种配对方法。据我们所知，拟议的跨学科配对分析在发展中国家或发达国家都是首次。目前的研究使用了30对配对（匹配30所优秀学校和30所典型学校），因为这为确定哪些做法导致了南非农村地区和乡镇的高绩效学校和平均/低绩效学校之间的差异提供了所需的明显缓解。研究将包括五个阶段:(1)使用全民评估数据来确定30特殊小学(及其配对30日)在南非的乡镇和农村地区,12(2)进行深入研究的学校(6典型异常匹配和6)(3)使用从第二阶段开发新的见解,更准确和更特定于上下文的学校领导和管理措施和飞行员这些在一组不同的18个学校(9配对);(4)在完成新的调查问卷后，将对所有60所学校进行调查，以捕获所有匹配对的SLM实践和行为。此外，该小组还将向教职工和学生发放背景调查问卷，并监督60所学校的年度国家评估。(5)最后阶段将包括验证在第二阶段确定、在第三阶段开发并在第四阶段捕获的SLM措施。这里的目的是使用严格的定量分析来确定SLM实践和行为的这些新度量是否系统相关，并且具体地说，它们的预测或解释能力。

The aim of the present study is to understand resilience and exceptionalism in high-functioning township and rural primary schools in South Africa. Previous research has shown that a large part of the explanation behind these schools' success is the leadership and management practices of teachers and particularly principals. Despite this near universal acceptance of the pivotal role of school leadership and management (SLM) for student achievement, accurate quantitative indicators of these practices remain elusive. Put simply, we do not currently have appropriate questionnaires that can accurately capture the school leadership and management practices among schools in challenging contexts in developing countries. One of the reasons for this is that these instruments are designed primarily with a developed-country-context in mind and do not account for possibilities that are prevalent in developing countries and typical in challenging contexts. Furthermore, in large-scale quantitative research, existing measures of SLM capture effective or ineffective SLM practices in superficial and fragmented ways. When looking at existing quantitative models of educational achievement researchers regularly find that there is a large unexplained component despite controlling for school resources and various student home-background factors. This is especially the case in challenging contexts where this disconnect between resources and results seems largest. One of the tentative explanations for this lack of explanatory power is that we are not currently capturing the true leadership and management practices (or lack thereof) in these schools and that this is partly due to inappropriate and inadequate SLM instruments. This is the first motivation for the inter-disciplinary nature of the proposed study; that the disciplines of Economics and Education bring different but complementary perspectives to bear on this issue of school leadership and management. Our previous research on schools in poor contexts in South Africa showed that deeper insights were obtained by a comparison between paired sets of schools with similar demographic and locational features, one performing poorly and the other performing strongly. This matched-pair approach is discussed briefly below. The proposed inter-disciplinary matched-pair analysis is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind in either developing or developed countries. The current research uses 30 matched-pairs (matching 30 exceptional schools and 30 typical schools) because this provides the stark relief needed to identify which practices are driving the difference between the high performing schools and the average/low-performing schools in rural areas and townships in South Africa. The research will involve five stages: (1) Use population-wide assessment data to identify 30 exceptional primary schools (and their 30 matched pairs) in townships and rural areas in South Africa, (2) Conduct an in-depth study of 12 of the schools (6 exceptional and 6 matched typical) (3) Using the insights gained from Stage 2 develop new, more accurate and more context-specific measures of school leadership and management and pilot these in a different set of 18 schools (9 matched-pairs); (4) After finalising the new questionnaire this will be administered to all 60 schools to capture the SLM practices and behaviours of all matched pairs. In addition the team will administer background questionnaires to staff and students and monitor the Annual National Assessments in each of the 60 schools, (5) The final stage will involve validating the SLM measures identified in Stage 2, developed in Stage 3 and captured in Stage 4. The aim here is to use rigorous quantitative analysis to determine whether or not these new measures of SLM practices and behaviours are systematically related and specifically their predictive or explanatory power.