Socio-Cultural Leadership: An Innovative Model For School Leadership

The conceptual framework of this study suggested that Socio-Cultural Leadership
was composed of the following four factors: Instructional Domain, Emotional Domain,
Community Domain, and Cultural Domain. Furthermore, it was posed that these factors,
collectively and independently, directly impacted student achievement in schools ofhigh
poverty. From this framework, the Socio-Cultural Leadership Questionnaire was
developed (SCLQ). The research questions that guided this study were:
1. Do the items of the survey instrument divide into the four domains as
described?
2. What is the relationship, collectively and independently, between SocioCultural
Leadership and student achievement in high-poverty schools?
3. Is the frequency in observed principal behaviors different between lowperforming
and high-performing schools? Therefore, the purpose of this study was to, via exploratory factor analysis; verify
that these four factors existed as described and to, via regression analysis, find the direct
relationship between the resulting factors and student achievement in high poverty
schools. High poverty schools were defined as schools where 50 percent ( 40 percent for
high schools) or more of the student population participated the federally funded Free
and/or Reduced Price Lunch Program. This study also sought to differentiate these
findings according to the performance levels of the schools sampled.
The pilot study, the descriptive statistics, the principal components analysis, and
the measures of internal consistency, all provided the researcher with empirical evidence
to establish the reliability and validity of specific SCLQ items along with the significance
of the resulting factors. Two of the five SCLQ subscales that resulted from the factor
analysis, OP (outreach to parents) and MIPD (management of instructional process
detractors), positively correlated with student achievement in the total sample (n = 903).
There is a less than 5 percent chance that these findings were due to a Type I sampling
error. Finally, principals in high-performing schools exhibited behaviors indicated by
subscales OP (outreach to parents) and MIPD (management of instructional process
detractors) significantly more than principals in low-performing schools.