Purpose: Concerns about variation in the quality of preservice preparation provided by many university-based principal preparation programs (PPPs) has led to calls to use outcomes of program graduates to hold PPPs accountable. Little research, however, has assessed the degree to which different outcomes for PPP graduates in fact vary systematically by program. Research Methods: Using administrative data from Tennessee, we link approximately a decade’s worth of PPP graduates to their schools, licensure examination scores, and multiple measures of job performance in their first 3 years as principals, including supervisors’ practice ratings on the state evaluation system, teacher and assistant principal ratings of school leadership on a statewide survey, and measures of student achievement growth. We use which PPP a principal completed to predict these outcomes using a regression approach with different sets of covariates. Findings: Although we are able to associate PPPs with high and low principal performance, we find that programs’ rankings vary by outcome measure, and we are unable to identify PPPs that perform consistently well or poorly across outcomes. Moreover, we find that Tennessee PPPs vary substantially in the characteristics of the schools into which their principals are hired and that taking these characteristics into account is important in ordering PPPs based on outcomes. In addition, even over a fairly long time frame, some programs produce too few graduates who later become school leaders to allow for reliable estimates. Implications: Although the use of graduates’ outcomes to differentiate PPPs holds promise, the methodological challenges to drawing valid and reliable conclusions about PPPs from graduates’ job outcomes are substantial. Policymakers and researchers may arrive at very different assessments of which PPPs are successful depending on which outcomes are chosen and what modeling approaches are employed.

中文翻译：

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主要准备计划和主要成果

目的：对许多基于大学的校长准备项目 (PPP) 提供的职前准备质量存在差异的担忧导致呼吁利用项目毕业生的成果来追究 PPP 的责任。然而，很少有研究评估 PPP 毕业生的不同结果实际上因项目而系统地变化的程度。研究方法：使用田纳西州的行政数据，我们将大约十年的 PPP 毕业生与他们的学校、执照考试分数以及他们作为校长的前 3 年工作表现的多项衡量标准联系起来，包括主管在州评估系统中的实践评级，教师和助理校长在全州调查中对学校领导的评级，以及学生成绩增长的衡量标准。我们使用委托人完成的 PPP 来使用具有不同协变量集的回归方法来预测这些结果。发现：虽然我们能够将 PPP 与主要绩效的高低联系起来，但我们发现项目的排名因结果衡量标准而异，我们无法确定 PPP 在结果中始终表现良好或不佳。此外，我们发现田纳西州的 PPP 在其校长被聘用的学校的特征方面差异很大，在根据结果对 PPP 进行排序时，考虑这些特征很重要。此外，即使在相当长的时间范围内，一些项目培养出的毕业生太少，后来成为学校领导者，无法进行可靠的估计。启示：虽然利用毕业生的成果来区分 PPPs 是有希望的，从毕业生的工作成果中得出关于 PPP 的有效和可靠结论的方法学挑战是巨大的。政策制定者和研究人员可能会根据选择的结果和采用的建模方法对哪些 PPP 成功做出截然不同的评估。