A Meta-Ethnography of International Case Studies on Contributors to School Success

Decades of research have investigated the indirect relationship between school leadership and student outcomes; however, there is a limited understanding and evidence regarding the indirect influence of leadership and which process variables are most effective in achieving school and student success. Moreover, we know very little about what that indirect influence looks like in various school and cultural contexts (e.g., how the influence processes differ across school levels, locations, student populations, social and economic status, and countries). This study aims to examine the definition of school success, identify the process variables (i.e., called "contributors" in this study), and describe how these process variables contribute to school success through a large-scale meta-synthesis of successful school case studies produced from the International Successful School Principal Project (ISSPP). The study employs meta-ethnography to analyze 92 individual case studies across 60 journal articles and 19 book chapters from 18 countries: Australia, China, Cyprus, Denmark, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The school, country, and cultural contexts are organized into the human ecological systems of micro-, meso-, exo-, macro-, and chronosystems. The primary indicators of school success include both academic and non-academic student outcomes, school reputation, a positive learning environment, stakeholder engagement, and instructional capacity. Factors contributing to school success fall into four main categories: nurturing interpersonal culture, instructional capacity, collaborative structure, and academic learning climate. In each country and context, the top indicators of school success and their contributing factors varied. This study's findings enhance our limited understanding of the leadership influence process, particularly in successful schools, in relation to the five layers of contextual influence and the evolving contributors over time. It also offers suggestions for school leaders from diverse cultural backgrounds to achieve and sustain school success.