Teachers’ perceptions of their school principal's leadership style and improvement in their students’ performance in specialized schools for students with conduct disorders

We examined the relationship between the school principal's leadership style, as perceived by the school teachers, and improvement in the performance of students with special education needs enrolled in specialized schools for students with conduct disorders. Our motivation originates in the increasing trend in their share within the general population and the premise that this unique population may respond differently to school principal leadership style. Datasets on students’ previous performance, students’ background characteristics, teacher profiles, and school features were collected. In addition, a questionnaire on teachers’ perceptions of their school principal's leadership style was distributed. Datasets were collected from 92 teachers who worked in special education needs public schools that specialized in conduct disorders. Using STATA software, we measured multilevel fixed-effects models. We found that the more the school principal is perceived as a transformational leader, the higher the students’ performance. Additionally, secondary school advantaged students (i.e. having a high level of previous performance, high socioeconomic strata), who are taught by more educated teachers, exhibit higher performance compared with their counterparts. Based on our finding, we recommend that policy makers would consider assigning transformational leaders to low-performing schools. In addition, policy makers may want to allocate extra learning resources and to provide access to learning services to support the disadvantaged students’ learning process.