Assistant Principal or Assistant to the Principal? Exploring the Contributions, Duties, and Preparation of Assistant Principals

Abstract

The assistant principalship is often viewed as a stepping stone to the principalship, but this framing of the position has resulted in the potential contributions of assistant principals to be overlooked. The three chapters of this dissertation explore the unique contributions, duties, and preparation needs of assistant principals. The first chapter examines the association between exposure to assistant principals and school outcomes. This chapter finds that students, especially Black students, have improved outcomes when they have an assistant principal, and teachers have improved outcomes when they have a more effective assistant principal. The second chapter explores the factors that are associated with assistant principals’ time allocation to leadership duties. I find that the personal and school characteristics of assistant principals have significant and substantive relationships with how assistant principals allocate their time. I also find that school achievement and principals’ evaluation ratings are positively associated with assistant principals allocating more time to instructional duties and less time to discipline. The third chapter of this dissertation examines whether the quality of school leadership preparation programs’ features are associated with graduates’ outcomes as assistant principals. I use a novel method for measuring program quality in this chapter. I find that the measure for program quality differentiates programs from one another and finds positive relationships between multiple program features and graduates’ perceptions of their program quality. The results from this chapter also suggest that the features that are positively associated with graduates’ perceptions of their programs are not the same features that are positively associated with graduates’ performance as an assistant principal. These three chapters suggest that assistant principals may have their own unique and measurable contributions to schools, that the scope of their duties depend on their context, and their perceptions and performance may provide valuable information to preparation program about the quality of their features.