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COVID-19 has presented unprecedented challenges to schools, leaving principals to lead rapid organizational change with limited guidance or support. Drawing on interviews from a larger, national study of principals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyzed the experiences of 20 principals in four large, urban school districts--Boston, Denver, New York, and San Diego. We found that principals relied on both district guidance and preexisting school structures and conditions as they led through the crisis. Although no principals were satisfied with district guidance, principals responded to guidance on a spectrum--from abiding, to challenging, to subverting guidance. Principals' responses were associated with their perceptions of the internal capacities of their schools, as well as the district guidance. Our findings support an emergent typology of principals as middle managers during crisis, which sheds light on how principals act as middle managers and how districts can support their work. [For the corresponding grantee submission, see ED618684.]

COVID-19 has presented unprecedented challenges to schools, leaving principals to lead rapid organizational change with limited guidance or support. Drawing on interviews from a larger, national study of principals at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we analyzed the experiences of 20 principals in four large, urban school districts--Boston, Denver, New York, and San Diego. We found that principals relied on both district guidance and preexisting school structures and conditions as they led through the crisis. Although no principals were satisfied with district guidance, principals responded to guidance on a spectrum--from abiding, to challenging, to subverting guidance. Principals' responses were associated with their perceptions of the internal capacities of their schools, as well as the district guidance. Our findings support an emergent typology of principals as middle managers during crisis, which sheds light on how principals act as middle managers and how districts can support their work.

COVID-19 shuttered schools across the United States, upending traditional approaches to education. We examine teachers' experiences during emergency remote teaching in the spring of 2020 using responses to a working conditions survey from a sample of 7,841 teachers across 206 schools and 9 states. Teachers reported a range of challenges related to engaging students in remote learning and balancing their professional and personal responsibilities. Teachers in high-poverty and majority Black schools perceived these challenges to be the most severe, suggesting the pandemic further increased existing educational inequities. Using data from both pre-post and retrospective surveys, we find that the pandemic and pivot to emergency remote teaching resulted in a sudden, large drop in teachers' sense of success. We also demonstrate how supportive working conditions in schools played a critical role in helping teachers to sustain their sense of success. Teachers were less likely to experience declines in their sense of success when they worked in schools with strong communication, targeted training, meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and authentic recognition during the pandemic.

Over the last five years, the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice (SLJ), a new, small public high school in Brooklyn, and The Essentials, a professional theater company, have joined forces to offer a low-budget, high-quality, in-house afterschool theater program for SLJ students. Both SLJ and The Essentials were in nascent stages when the partnership began. This article describes the afterschool theater program model the two organizations developed together over the course of five years. It also recounts lessons learned from pitfalls and successes encountered along the way so that the model's successes can be replicated--and improved upon--elsewhere. (Contains 1 endnote.)

We studied how six high-performing, high-poverty schools in one large Massachusetts city implemented the state's new teacher evaluation policy. The sample includes traditional, turnaround, restart, and charter schools, each of which had received the state's highest accountability rating. We sought to learn how these successful schools approached teacher evaluation, including classroom observations, feedback, and summative ratings. We interviewed 142 teachers and administrators and analyzed data using sensemaking theory, which considers how individuals' knowledge and beliefs, the context in which they work, and the policy stimuli they encounter affect implementation. All schools prioritized the goal of developing their teachers over holding them accountable. The spillover effects of additional policies affected how these schools approached implementation.

Teachers in high-poverty schools often feel stressed and fatigued. We might expect that if we ask these teachers to take on even more work by meeting regularly in collaborative improvement teams, they will respond with skepticism, even resentment. But in a study of 83 teachers in six outstanding high-poverty schools, these researchers found the opposite. Teachers consistently reported that their teams reduced stress and gave them the support they needed to persevere. This article describes how teams operated in the five schools that made them the central component of school improvement. It also discusses the conditions that made teams effective in these schools, such as sacrosanct time in the schedule for team meetings; the school principal's active engagement with teams; facilitation of teams by teacher leaders; and the integration of other supports for teacher growth into the fabric of the school.

Background/Context: Over the past three decades, teacher turnover has increased substantially in U.S. public schools, especially in those serving large portions of low-income students of color. Teachers who choose to leave high-poverty schools serving large numbers of students of color usually transfer to schools serving wealthier, Whiter student populations. Some researchers have interpreted this trend to mean that "teachers systematically favor higher-achieving, non-minority, non-low-income students." These ideas have influenced policy analysis concerning high-poverty schools but offered little guidance for those who would address this problem. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: This article presents an alternative explanation for turnover--one grounded in organizational theory and substantiated by an emerging line of research. In doing so, it reframes the debate over what fuels high rates of teacher turnover in high-poverty schools and provides advice for policy makers and practitioners, as well as recommendations for productive possibilities for future research. Research Design: This article reviews six studies analyzing turnover as a function of school context rather than as a function of student demographics. Based on the patterns regarding what factors influence teacher departures across these studies, we pursue these predictors by summarizing what is known about them and how each supports teachers' work. Findings/Results: The six overarching studies reviewed here collectively suggest that teachers who leave high-poverty schools are not fleeing their students. Rather, they are fleeing the poor working conditions that make it difficult for them to teach and for their students to learn. The working conditions that teachers prize most--and those that best predict their satisfaction and retention--are social in nature. They include school leadership, collegial relationships, and elements of school culture. Conclusions/Recommendations: The poor working conditions common in America's neediest schools explain away most, if not all, of the relationship between student characteristics and teacher attrition. This is important because, unlike demographic characteristics of students, working conditions can be addressed. Policy makers and practitioners have many options for improving aspects of the school environment, and, although more research can inform this work, much is already known about what matters to teachers as they are deciding whether to continue teaching in their schools.

Background/Context: Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers' ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers' effectiveness across classrooms. Recent research finds that teams can contribute to teachers' development and increased student achievement. However, research also suggests that teams often fail and that most schools are not organized to ensure their success. Therefore, it is important to learn more about how teams function in successful schools, how teachers experience them, and what factors contribute to their success. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Data for this article were drawn from a comparative case study focusing on the human-capital practices in six successful high-poverty, high-minority schools (traditional, turnaround, restart, and charter), all located in one Massachusetts city. Each school was affected by a distinct set of state and local policies. Here, we focus on the schools' approaches to professional learning and collaboration among teachers. Did they rely on teams, and, if so, what purposes did the teams serve, and how were they organized? How did teachers assess their experience with teams? What role did administrators play? Were there notable school-to-school differences in how these teams were organized and managed? Research Design/Data Collection and Analysis: For this qualitative, comparative case study, we conducted semistructured interviews with 142 teachers, administrators, and other staff in six elementary and middle schools. Interview protocols encouraged participants to discuss their school's approach to teachers' professional learning and work with colleagues. During school visits, we also observed a wide range of day-to-day practices and collected documents describing school policies and practices. We coded our data with both emic and etic topical codes and used various matrices to analyze responses within and across the sites. Conclusions/Recommendations: Five schools relied on teams as a central mechanism for school improvement, dedicating substantial blocks of time each week to teachers' meetings. Teams focused on matters of content (curriculum, lesson plans, and student achievement) and the student cohort (individual progress, group behavior, and organizational culture). Teachers valued their work on teams, saying that it supported their instruction and contributed to their school's success by creating coherence across classrooms and shared responsibility for students. Factors that supported teams included having a worthy purpose in support of the school's mission; sufficient, regular time for meetings; engaged support by administrators; and facilitation by trained teacher-leaders.