Superintendent leadership roles as perceived by Indiana school board presidents in the accomplishment of performance indicators

The purpose of this study was to examine the priority school board presidents placed on two roles of public school superintendents, instructional leadership and management of school district operations. Furthermore, this study ascertained the influence of school district size by enrollment and the geographic locale within the State of Indiana.;Two factorial ANOVA analyses were conducted to compare the differences between the perceived importance of instructional leadership and management of school district operations across the four levels of school district size, four levels of school district geographic locale, and sixteen different possible interactions between district size and location.;Surveys were mailed to the home address of each school board president who served as board president during the 2007-2008 academic school year. The participants in this study included 162 school board presidents in the State of Indiana which reflects a 55.3% return rate of the survey instrument. The findings by the researcher were based on the derived results from the statistical analysis: (1) School board presidents did not significantly differ on their responses to the importance of instructional leadership across the levels of school district enrollment. (2) School board president responses were not significantly different across the levels of school district geographic locale in regards to the importance instructional leadership by the superintendent. (3) School board presidents did not significantly differ on their responses to the importance of management of school district operations across the levels of school district enrollment. (4) School board president responses were not significantly different across the levels of school district geographic locale in regards to management of school district operations importance by the superintendent. (5) The mean rating of importance across the levels of geographic locales were observably higher but not statistically significantly higher in instructional leadership than management of school district operations. (6) All groups perceived the performance indicators linked to the professional standard superintendent's actions in political, legal, social, economic, and cultural environments as least important based on mean scores for each of the eight professional standards.