부산대학교 도서관

The American Institutes for Research® (AIR®) has conducted an independent evaluation of the implementation and impact of the Teach For America (TFA) Rural School Leadership Academy (RSLA), a 1-year professional development program designed for two streams of aspiring and current leaders. The objective of RSLA is to recruit and provide professional training and supports to cohorts of educators across multiple states to serve and grow their careers as school administrators in rural communities. TFA recruits groups of individuals to participate in RSLA: Stream 1 includes teachers and other student-facing educators with little or no school leadership experience, and Stream 2 includes current teacher leaders and midlevel administrators in rural schools who may be on the path to becoming a school principal. The primary component of RSLA is to develop cohorts of professional learning communities through the Learning Cycles. Our evaluation found that two of the four cohorts of Stream 1 participants and three of four cohorts of Stream 2 participants met the fidelity-of-implementation standards set by TFA and AIR for Learning Cycle attendance. Learning Cycle attendance among Cohort 2 participants was low during the spring cycle, which coincided with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. If not for the pandemic, it is likely that three of the four cohorts of Stream 1 participants and all cohorts of Stream 2 participants would have met the fidelity-of-implementation standards set by TFA and AIR for Learning Cycle attendance. Using a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences design, AIR's impact analysis focused on Stream 2 participants, who are school-level leaders able to influence student outcomes schoolwide. Due in part to the pandemic, we were only able to include 17 Stream 2 participants in our evaluation of program impact on schoolwide student proficiency, which limited our power to identify statistically significant program impacts. We estimate that after 1 year of participation in RSLA, ELA proficiency was 2 percentage points higher and math proficiency was 1 percentage point lower, on average, in Stream 2 participants' schools than in comparison schools. These differences, which are equivalent to effect sizes of 0.050 and -0.026 respectively, are not statistically significant at p < 0.05.