Although it is widely believed that good school principals have a positive impact on student achievement, little systematic research has been done to date on the effect of strong school leadership. Now a new study finds that highly effective principals raise the achievement of a typical student in their schools by between 0.05 and 0.21 standard deviations, the equivalent of between two and seven months of additional learning each school year. Click here to read why and how “School Leaders Matter.”

Hoover Institution Press released The Best Teachers in the World: Why We Don’t Have Them and How We Could in which author John E. Chubb outlines a three-pronged strategy for raising teacher quality that is very different from the approach this country has historically followed. Chubb argues that, to develop the highest-achieving students in the world, the United States must attract, develop, and retain substantially stronger teachers, particularly if it wants to equal or surpass the achievement of top-performing nations in the world. The best achievement in the world requires the best teachers in the world—which US education policy has not been delivering.