My Writing

Here is some of my writing on a variety of topics.

Publications

McGuigan, Leigh, Systems Thinking and Culture Change in Urban Education, in Hoy, Wayne K., and DiPaola, Michael, Improving Schools, Studies in Leadership and Culture, 2008.

McGuigan, Leigh and Hoy, Wayne K., Principal Leadership: Creating a Culture of Academic Optimism to Improve Achievement for All Students, in Leadership and Policy in Schools, September 2006.

Leigh’s Weekly Reader

When I first arrived at New York City Schools as Director of Strategic Planning for Human Resources, I wrote a short newsletter on education topics for selected staff in our central office. To take a look, click here.

Looking at the Math Wars

I set out to take a look at the NCTM standards for teaching math, the controversy surrounding those standards, and whether there was any research to show that textbooks that follow the standards are more effective than other textbooks. Click here to see what I concluded.

Teacher Efficacy

Teacher efficacy is an academic term that means, essentially, teachers’ confidence that they can successfully teach the students they face. It is one of the few variables that outweighs the effects of poverty on academic achievement. In essence, teachers who say “bring it on…I can teach anybody” are much more likely than other teachers to cause learning gains. Where does teacher efficacy come from, and what are the characteristics of schools and principals that cause it? Click here to find out.

Everything I Wanted to Know About Standardized Tests

As someone coming into education from another field, there were a number of areas I simply had to master, and standardized testing was one of them. I ended up writing my own primer on standardized tests, including an in-depth look at two common tests used in Ohio: the Ohio Proficiency Test and the Terra Nova, Second. One thing I found out during my study of education was that many people who have strong opinions about standardized tests don’t really know much about them. It’s fun to look at actual test questions and see what we are asking kids to do. I concluded that fears about standardized tests leading to some sort of drill-and-kill classroom mentality are unfounded. (Although a lousy teacher can always make learning dreadful, that’s not the tests’ fault.) My study convinced me that the major test designers have worked hard, and have largely succeeded, at fashioning tests that fairly measure the abilities of students to do some (but not all) of the important things we want them to do: especially to read well, solve math problems that require analysis, and compute accurately. If you’ve got an interest in how standardized tests are created, scored and used, and the stomach for a long, dry paper, click here.

Something Completely Different

The improbable story of how a member of the corporate establishment came to start, and then sell, an internet company that offered gear, advice and attitude for women climbers and outdoor adventurers, as told in an issue of my internet newsletter. Click here.

Legal Analysis: Can Value Added Scores Be Part of Teacher Evaluation?

I like to think I’m a fully recovered lawyer, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to do legal research. Click here to see whether, under Ohio law, teachers’ value added scores could be taken into account in personnel evaluations.

My Dissertation

I used my dissertation as an opportunity to explore several school characteristics that have been shown in well-designed statistical studies to be associated with student achievement, as well as to work with value-added measures of student achievement growth (discussed in more detail in the Recent Work section). I hypothesized that schools that have enabling bureaucracies (defined as school structures and processes that teachers see as enabling rather than hindering their work) would have higher levels of collective efficacy, greater academic emphasis, and higher trust, and that, in turn, these characteristics would lead to higher student achievement. This rather geeky topic interested me because quantitative studies have not shown that school leaders matter much in educational outcomes. I know this is unlikely to be true, and I saw the creation of effective school structures and processes as an indirect measure of principal leadership. I wanted to see if, looking at leadership in this way, I could show that principals mattered. As expected, I found that schools in which teachers perceived school management, rules and processes as enabling their work had higher levels of collective efficacy, academic emphasis, and trust, and that these traits led to higher levels of achievement as measured by percentages of students found proficient on state tests, even when controlling for socioeconomic status. These traits, however, were not associated with school wide value-added growth, most likely because there was extremely high variation in value-added growth among teachers and among grades. To access the published dissertation, click here.