ARE ASPIRING ADMINISTRATOR VALUES THE SAME AS THE PRINCIPALS WHO HIRE THEM? A QUANTITATIVE STUDY ANALYZING THE VALUES AND TRAINING EXPERIENCES OF SITTING PRINCIPALS AND ASPIRING ADMINISTRATORS

Abstract

Each year, thousands of aspiring school administrators attempt to impress the sitting principal of a school in order to be rewarded with an opportunity to lead. When these future leaders interview, do they have the same priorities and values as the sitting principal who will hire them? This study investigated the possibility that there is a disconnect between how sitting principals and aspiring administrators view their leadership training experiences, as well as how they would prioritize a list of research-based best practices in school leadership. If aspiring administrators know what sitting principals value, then they can better prepare for interviews and search out leadership training opportunities to meet this demand. Sitting principal and aspiring administrator participants in this non-experimental quantitative research study came from six school districts in Tennessee. The districts were of varying sizes, geographic location, socio-economic status of students, and deliberateness of aspiring administrator programs. A cross-sectional survey design was used for the study and was broken into two parts: first, participants were asked to answer 15 Likert-Scale questions reflecting on their experiences with leadership development and secondly, participants were asked to rank 21 research-based best practices in order from most important to least important. After studying the descriptive data, the rankings, and hypothesis testing for each part of the survey, it was determined that there was very little evidence to support that there was a difference in the way aspiring administrators and sitting principals responded to the survey. In fact, in several cases, the two groups answered and ranked items in the exact same way. Similarities in the responses provide insight into the specific values and priorities of the groups and gives aspiring administrators some valuable conversation points when interviewing for school leadership positions.