The purpose of this study was to investigate the practices of elementary, middle, and high school principals that are associated with the Standards of Learning accreditation status of schools in Virginia. A number of factors that discriminate between Accredited with Warning and Fully Accredited schools were investigated. Questionnaires were administered to 142 principals and 567 teachers. Items in the questionnaires were associated with sub-domains that affect the accreditation status of schools. Characteristics of principals, teachers, and schools were collected in a demographic section of each questionnaire. A principal components analysis was applied to reduce the number of sub-domains to a smaller set of meaningful measures. A combination of predictor variables was used in the final analysis. They are factors derived from the characteristics of principals'principal's years of experience, principal's years of experience in his or her current position, gender of the principal, principal's highest degree (master's or less or more than master's); and principal's school level assignment (elementary, middle, or high); characteristics of schools' percentage of children receiving free or reduced-price lunches and school setting (urban, suburban, or rural); and principal practices--providing instructional assistance and support, establishing infrastructure, implementing the curriculum, and being sensitive to students. The overall Wilks' lambda (λ=.69) was significant (p<.00) indicating that the predictors discriminated between the two groups. Discriminant function analysis indicated that the best predictors of accreditation status were percentage of students receiving free or reduced-price lunches, school setting urban v. other (suburban and rural), principal assignment middle v. other (elementary and high), and principal assignment elementary v. other (middle and high). When classification analysis was applied, 79.5 percent of the cases for Accredited with Warning and Fully Accredited schools were correctly classified. Schools Accredited with Warning had higher mean scores on the percentage of children receiving free or reduced-price lunches. These schools were more likely to be in urban settings than suburban or rural settings, and they were more likely to be middle schools than elementary or high schools. Fully Accredited schools were more likely to be elementary schools than middle or high schools. None of the principals' practices--providing instructional assistance and support, establishing infrastructure, implementing the curriculum, and being sensitive to students--discriminated between the two levels of accreditation status of the schools. / Ed. D.

Using measures of student growth has become more popular in recent years—especially in the context of high stakes testing and accountability. While these methods have advantages over historical status measures, there is still much evidence to be gathered on patterns of growth generally and in student subgroups. To date, most research studies dealing with student growth focus on the effectiveness of specific interventions or examine growth in a few urban areas. This project explored math, reading, and English language arts (ELA) growth in the students of two rural school districts in Utah. The study incorporated hierarchical and latent growth methods to describe and compare these students’ growth in third, fourth and fifth grades. Additionally, student characteristics were tested as predictors of growth. Results showed student growth as complex and patterns varied across grade levels, subjects and student subgroups. Growth generally declined after third grade and students experienced summer loss in the second summer more than the first. Females began third grade ahead of their male peers in ELA and reading and began at a similar level in math. Male students narrowed the gap in reading and ELA in fourth and fifth grade and pulled ahead of their female peers in math in third grade. Low SES students were the most similar to their peers in math and ELA growth but were ahead of their peers in reading. Hispanic and Native American students started consistently behind white students in all subjects. Hispanic students tended to grow faster during the school year but lost more over the summer months. Native American students had more shallow growth than white students with a gradual decline in growth in fourth and fifth grades. ELA and reading growth were more closely related to each other than with math growth. Initial achievement estimates were more highly correlated with subsequent growth than previous years’ growth. A cross-classified model for teacher-level effects was attempted to account for students changing class groupings each school year but computational limits were reached. After estimating subjects and grade levels separately, results showed variance in test scores was primarily due to student differences. In ELA and reading, school differences accounted for a larger portion of the overall variance than teacher differences.