The types of leadership practices that might work to improve mathematics curriculum and instruction are of interest to people who are concerned about the quality of mathematics education in rural schools. Certain leadership practices have been shown to influence school climate and culture, which indirectly influences student achievement, but there is no agreement regarding their effectiveness. Nevertheless, particular content-specific practices have been recommended for leadership of mathematics education, but little empirical work to date has substantiated the extensiveness of those practices, the conditions associated with their use, or their influence on school culture and performance (Larson et al., 2006).
This study investigated the separate and combined influences of principals’ mathematics knowledge, principals’ knowledge of mathematics education and a set of contextual and organizational variables, including locale, school size, per pupil expenditure, free and reduced lunch rate, and the employment of a mathematics department chair, on principals’ perceptions of effective leadership of mathematics education reform. Gender was included as a control variable because prior literature suggested that gender would likely have an influence on mathematics knowledge and therefore had the potential to moderate the influence of that variable on the dependent variable, leadership of mathematics education reform.
The researcher mailed a questionnaire to a random sample of 596 high school principals in Pennsylvania, 260 of whom returned questionnaires, yielding an overall response rate of 50.4%. Data were analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. Findings based on backwards stepwise regression analyses showed that none of the target variables exerted a significant influence on principals’ perception of effective leadership of mathematics education reform. Moreover, the control variable, gender, exerted a significant influence only in the data set from which outliers had been removed. It exerted no significant influence in the models developed using the full data set.
Although none of the target variables were found to influence leadership of mathematics education reform, results did reveal how much high school principals value certain practices in mathematics instruction and provided insight into the mathematics backgrounds of the principals who responded to the survey and principals’ relative comfort level in performing a variety of mathematics tasks.