Building school-wide capacity for improvement: the role of leadership, school organizational conditions, and teacher factors

Education policies for greater accountability of schools assume that schools are capable of building their capacity for continuous improvement. While policy-makers, scholars, and practitioners acknowledge the importance of building school-wide capacity for continuous improvement, empirical evidence to this effect remains thin. In this study, we examine the extent to which school improvement capacity develops over time in a sample of elementary schools in The Netherlands. Leadership practices, school organizational conditions, teacher motivation, and teacher learning were used to measure school-wide capacity for improvement. Mixed-model analysis of longitudinal data from 1,010 teachers of 32 Dutch elementary schools showed that schools are capable of building school-wide capacity, and that sustaining a high level of capacity seemed to be more difficult. The findings suggest that improving leadership may be an important first step in the process of building school-wide capacity.