Caring Leadership in Schools

Introduction

Ambitious aspirations for student learning require both a strong sense of academic press and a powerful sense of community for students, teachers, and families. Ancess (2000) refers to this as “a condition of nurture and rigor or affiliation and intellectual development” (p. 595). However, over the past several decades, scholarly work on school leadership focused on creating academic press, including raising course rigor, implementing higher standards, monitoring and evaluating teaching, student testing, and ending social promotion. Less empirical and theoretical attention has been given to creating communities of support that promote student development.

We know that this is a problematic state of affairs. Academic press is demonstrably important for student success, and consistency in expectations establishes a framework where students know what they are expected to learn. However, focusing exclusively or primarily on academic press is insufficient and even deleterious (Crosnoe, 2011; Quint, 2006), especially for students whose lives are affected by poverty (Becker & Luthar, 2002; Rumberger, 2011). As Hoy, Tartar, and Hoy (2006) contend, academic press alone does not attend sufficiently to the quality of social relations required for effective teaching and learning. That is, schools with strong press can still prove inadequate if they do not also create sufficient academic and social support for students. Studies have long found that it is the combination of strong academic press and strong academic and social support that benefit students most, in their engagement in school, in their academic success, and in their personal well-being (e.g., V. Lee & Smith, 1999; Marks, 2000).

The challenge for school leadership is difficult—that is, how to cultivate and manage communities of teaching and learning in schools that embody a balance of press and support. In this article, we explore this school leadership challenge conceptually and empirically, looking specifically at a central quality of academic and social support—caring. We proceed from the premise that teaching and learning, and press and support, are functions of the nature and qualities of social relationships between and among students, teachers, leaders, and parents (e.g., Murphy & Torres, 2014). School leadership is, therefore, at its core a social relationship. From this premise, we argue that caring and caring leaders provide a foundation for school community.

We focus on caring for several reasons. First, the literature on caring in education suggests that the concept is powerful in terms of addressing the immediate needs of students, teachers, and families, and may also promote the longer term outcomes of belonging and engagement, a sense of personal well-being, and academic success. Second, caring is something that is at play all the time. Every action and interaction can take on qualities of caring or not caring, and these qualities have consequences for parties to the interaction, including the observers. Third, as important as caring seems to be, its meaning in schools is vague, ambiguous, unsettled, and weakly explicated (Thompson, 1998).

In this article, we first review the conceptual and empirical literature from several disciplines to discern different meanings of caring and caring leadership and synthesize them in a framework that is applicable to schools. Because our focus is on school organization and leadership, we are particularly interested in research that speaks not only to caring interpersonal relationships but also to caring organizations. A second strand of our work applies the emerging concept of caring school leaders in an analysis of a large-scale teacher survey that contains items that reflect caring leadership and caring organizational supports for students. This allows us to explore how principal caring is associated with the academic and personal support provided by schools. We conclude with interpretive comments about our findings and explore several implications for the future study of caring and caring leadership in schools.

The Essence of Caring

The education literature that examines the importance of social relationships among students, teachers, and leadership is brimming with direct and indirect references to care and caring (Murphy & Torres, 2014), but systematic conceptualizations of the concepts are rare. Some authors point to practices or behaviors of teachers and principals in schools and assume, without connection to a definitional construct, that they are expressions of caring; others describe practices and behaviors that reflect what philosophers call caring without naming them as such. Thus, it is important to identify what is meant by the term and related concepts such as empathetic relationships, compassion, and so on. We focus on a definition of caring as a property of relationships, its consequences, and the conditions that enable caring to become a feature of both relationships and groups, particularly those in schools.

Supporting Caring in Schools: Organizational and Collective Characteristics

Our perspective is based on the assumption that caring, and a caring learning environment, should be expressed at multiple levels in a school: by the principal, by teachers in their joint work and in their classrooms, and at the level of students as they work with their peers. The core elements and enabling conditions for creating a caring learning environment are, therefore, assumed to be not only relational but also linked to group contexts (Murphy & Torres, 2014). Although deep relational caring may be limited in schools, the organizational practices that bring people together in collaborative work may foster a shared understanding of the purposes, values, and means of the immediate and larger tasks that are focused on meeting the needs of students. To some degree, these may be thought of as the outcomes of adults caring for each other in the school community.

For example, one particularly important support that schools and teachers can provide is a safe and secure environment for learning (Christle, Jolivette, & Nelson, 2005; Reynolds et al., 2014). We see in studies across a variety of areas of interest (e.g., child development, school reform) that security needs are of major importance for youngsters (Dinham, 2005; Joselowsky, 2007) and that meeting those needs is essential for their academic, social, and emotional development (Christle et al., 2005; Rumberger & Palardy, 2005). Efforts to create spaces in which it is safe and enjoyable for students to engage with the business of schooling and develop as persons (Antrop-González & De Jesus, 2006; Creemers & Reezigt, 1996; Robinson, 2007) allow schools to become sanctuaries for some students (Ancess, 2003; Antrop-González, 2006).

Environments that are safe for students may also include a sense of being in a risk tolerant and safe environment for adults. In particular, collaboration promotes a shared stake in that work and a common set of values that are most conducive to a shared sense of responsibility for the collective impact of the school on students (Kruse et al., 1995) and that creates opportunities for attentiveness and knowing of others. Joint ownership, responsibility, and accountability may motivate action on others’ behalf in part because one’s own success is tied up in the success of others, which means acting on their behalf so that they and all succeed (V. Lee & Smith, 1996). These conditions of community create greater possibilities for mutuality—that all can be at particular times the one who is caring and the one who is cared for—and reciprocity (Fielding & Moss, 2011).

Moreover, organizational conditions such as low mobility among both adults and students may also promote relational conditions that are conducive to caring: depth, duration, and trust. Schools may be in a better position to create networks of reciprocity than other settings because they tend to have more stability in both their professional personnel and their student bodies and more opportunities for adults to work with students in longer term relationships. They may create histories that encourage continuity in relationships, another enabling condition of caring. In this regard, caring may be a precondition for enhancing social capital. On the other hand, high mobility limits the effects of caring because it constrains duration and depth. Both student and teacher turnover causes stress, dissatisfaction, and “burnout” (Scott, Aiken, Mechanic, & Moravcsik, 1995), which, in turn, may cause emotional withdrawal, that decreases the possibility of satisfying, caring relationships. This affects some schools more than others: high poverty neighborhoods have greater student mobility, which may limit the development of teacher–student, peer, and community caring relationships (Rumberger, 2003).

In addition to the outcome of denser social networks, caring may contribute to teachers’ socio-emotional health. Teachers’ capacity to promote desirable social outcomes for pupils is, to a large extent, premised on their own resilience: teachers who are burned out or low in self-efficacy lack the capacity to care about their students (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009; Kahn, Schneider, Jenkins-Henkelman, & Moyle, 2006), and burnout is, according to Santoro (2011), more prevalent in high poverty schools. Thus, research on teachers’ working conditions suggests that unless teachers are cared for and supported, they may be unable to provide classroom environments that will contribute to broader goals of youth development (Brissie, Hoover-Dempsey, & Bassler, 1988); conversely, when teachers’ work is collaborative and principals care about teachers’ well-being, students are more likely to thrive (Langer, 2000; Noddings, 2005).

Toward a Construct of Caring School Leadership

We have focused on teachers and students because relatively few educational studies in education have examined caring among formal leaders. While the words caring and principal or leader can frequently be found in conjunction with each other, they are typically not elaborated or examined in depth. If we take the core elements of caring seriously, we must consider that the actions, interactions, and practices of leadership are caring if three conditions are met (Boyatzis et al., 2006):

The expressions of caring that emanate from such knowledge, understanding, and motivational orientation may be situational, idiosyncratic to different groups and individuals, and dynamic, changing as understanding and needs develop. In schools, where much of the work of leadership is invisible to others, achieving the deep mutuality suggested by the philosophical literature may be difficult. In particular, students may have more limited contact with school leaders than teachers and may have only a fuzzy sense of what a principal does that might be interpreted by them as caring. Teachers, on the other hand, typically experience more consistent attention from and interaction with school leaders.

An Empirical Examination of Caring and Its Effects

The framework that we have developed to understand the nature and role of caring in schools was deliberately broad but centered on how adult professionals in schools establish relationships and a culture that supports the development of children and youth. Our focus moved beyond the implicit assumption in much of the educational literature that caring is primarily a dyadic (or a very small group) relationship to an extended consideration of how the behavior of principals and other school leaders may foster school environments that promote a sense of being cared for. In the remainder of this article, we will examine two questions that provide a preliminary look at the importance of caring in this broader context:

We were able to use an existing database that included a number of items that form a measure of caring principal leadership. We were then able to examine the relationship of that measure to several variables that reflect expressions of teacher–teacher caring and school–student caring. Finally, we can link variables that reflect caring to student academic achievement.

The Measures

We use five primary survey-based measures in our analysis: (1) Caring Principal Leadership, (2) Academic Support for Student Learning, (3) Teacher Collaboration, (4) Teachers’ De-privatized Practice, and (5) Collective Responsibility for the academic environment. For each of these measures, factor analysis or an optimal scaling-correspondence analysis was performed using the SPSS analysis package. A measure of student academic achievement was developed as a school-level cross-grade/cross-subject variable by adding the state test results in math and language arts/reading. In addition to these measures, two additional school-level variables were used: (1) school poverty levels and (2) school grade level (i.e., elementary and secondary). We now turn to additional discussion about the construction of these measures.

Caring principal leadership

We developed a measure of Caring Principal Leadership by searching for items in the larger survey data set that, compared with other items, best related to core dimensions of caring as discussed above and enabling organizational conditions as they emerged in the limited empirical research on caring in schools. We were able to find items that measure all the core elements except mutuality. For enabling conditions for caring, we were able to find only indicators of trust. For our purposes, we decided to combine the six items measuring the core elements and two measuring trust.

The Cronbach’s alpha for this measure was .93. The items, their correspondence to our model, and their loadings in the optimized scaling analysis are shown in Table 1.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 1.

Survey Items Related to Principal Caring.

	Dimension
My school administrator develops and atmosphere of caring and trust. (Trust)	.764
My school administrator is supportive of my decisions about managing student discipline problems. (Situationality)	.641
My school administrator ensures wide participation in decisions about school improvement. (Authenticity)	.645
When teachers are struggling, our principal provides support for them. (Situationality)	.644
In general, I believe my principal’s motives and intentions are good. (Authenticity)	.715
I feel free to discuss work problems with my principal without fear of having it used against me later. (Motivational Displacement)	.712
If my principal promised to do something, s/he would follow through. (Trust)	.714
Our principal is responsive to the needs and concerns expressed by community members. (Attentiveness)	.506
Cronbach’s alpha	.926

A few examples illustrate how these items may relate to caring and expressions of caring. The item “My school administrator is supportive of my decisions about managing student discipline problems” may relate to caring by demonstrating a principal’s understanding of teachers, the particular knowledge they may have about such discipline problems, and their need for their professional judgments to be supported. Indeed, this leadership practice may also be seen as a way in which principals act on behalf of teachers, honoring their discretion in handling such matters themselves. The item “When teachers are struggling, our principal provides support for them” may reflect caring in that for principals to act this way presumes that they have some understanding of teachers’ needs and challenges and that they are motivated through their understanding to provide support. And the item “My school administrator ensures wide participation in decisions about school improvement” can relate to caring in that opportunities for participation may proceed from principals’ knowledge of teachers and what they may add to decision making and from principals’ reasoning that participation may be an effective way to address teachers’ needs and interests.

Caring for students: Academic support for students

The discussion of how schools care for students in the previous sections was broad and emphasized social and emotional support and creating a sense of belonging. V. Lee and Smith (1999), for example, differentiate between social support and academic support. In this analysis, we focus on how teachers view the school’s efforts to create support for student success in their academic work, which has been referred to as creating an inclusive intellectual community (Marks, Secada, & Doane, 1996).

Most studies of academic support and caring for student’s academic participation gather data from students and focus on fair treatment, availability of additional help, and teacher caring about academic success (Croninger & Lee, 2001; Marks et al., 1996; Sanders, 1998). We examined the teacher survey to find comparable items from the teachers’ perspective and selected those that reflected organizational expressions of caring, with a focus on supporting the more vulnerable students. This composite variable was based on four items (α = .86) such as “Students have equal opportunities to be assigned to the best teachers” and “Struggling students get the attention that they need.” High values (i.e., on a 6-point scale) indicate a high level of student support. The optimized items are shown in Table 2.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 2.

Survey Items Related to Student Support.

	Dimension
Students have equal opportunities to be assigned to the best teachers.	.582
Resources are allocated to support students who have greater needs.	.651
All students receive the same quality of instruction.	.715
Struggling students get the attention they need in this school.	.735
Cronbach’s alpha	.836

This scale assumes that in a caring school, the most important resources—teachers—are allocated to the students who need them rather than the more typical situation where the least experienced and effective are assigned to the weakest students. Other resources are, however, important, and two additional items in the scale reflect this focus. Caring for students in an academic setting requires that the school pay attention to the quality of instruction to ensure that a student’s opportunity to develop is not impeded by using weak instructional approaches (Murphy, 2016).

Caring and Collective Responsibility

As we pointed out in the literature review, caring in group or organized settings depends, in part, on the group members’ mutual commitment to establishing the responsibility of all members for creating a caring environment. Our survey did not have any measures of group commitment for caring, but it did contain measures that reflect the groups’ responsibility for creating an effective environment for student learning (Collective Responsibility). There is no consensus in the literature on how to measure Collective Responsibility in schools and it is sometimes conflated with sense of efficacy (V. Lee & Smith, 1996). In this study, we identified items that seemed to reflect teachers’ sense of willingness to work with each other beyond their individual classrooms to create a more effective learning environment. These, which included items such as “How many teachers feel responsible to help each other improve their instruction,” were subjected to the SPSS optimized scaling procedure, the results of which are shown in Table 3. We assumed that this is a proxy measure for collective commitment to caring.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 3.

Survey Items Related to Collective Responsibility.

	Dimension
How many teachers in this school feel responsible to help each other improve their instruction?	.731
How many teachers in this school take responsibility for improving the school outside their own class?	.811
How many teachers in this school help maintain discipline in the entire school, not just their classroom?	.729
How many teachers in this school meet with other teachers to collaboratively plan?	.514
Cronbach’s alpha	.855

A Community for Teachers: Teacher Professional Work Relations

We draw attention to research suggesting that teachers’ peer relationships are an important foundation for developing a caring environment for students. Several variables measuring teacher professional community were developed based on earlier work by Louis and Marks (1998) and validated by Lomos, Hofman, and Bosker (2011). In this analysis, we decided to focus only on those aspects of professional community that presume a solid, trusting relationship, in particular, depth of collaboration (frequency with which the respondent worked with others) and depth of de-privatization (frequency of visiting other teachers’ classrooms and being visited), which implies a deeper form of trusting collaboration. Eight items tapping these two dimensions were subjected to a factor analysis (oblimin rotation, which assumes that factors may be correlated; not shown) that indicated that they represented two distinct dimensions. The items loading on each dimension were then scaled using the SPSS optimal scaling/multiple correspondence program. The items and their reliability are shown in Tables 4 and 5.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 4.

Survey Items Related to Collaboration.

	Dimension
How often in this school year have you exchanged suggestions for curriculum materials with colleagues?	.638
How often in this school year have you had conversations with colleagues about development of new curriculum?	.657
How often in this school year have you had conversations with colleagues about what helps students learn best?	.681
How often in this school year have you had conversations with colleagues about the goals of this school?	.699
Cronbach’s alpha	.835

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 5.

Survey Items: De-privatization of Teachers’ Work.

	Dimension
How often in this school year have you invited someone in to help teach your class(es)?	.546
How often in this school year have you had colleagues observe your classroom?	.732
How often in this school year have you received meaningful feedback on your performance from colleagues?	.678
How often in this school year have you visited other teachers’ classrooms to observe instruction?	.576
Cronbach’s alpha	.805

Analysis and Findings

Because the empirical research on principal caring is limited, we chose to take an exploratory approach to address the two questions. Our purpose was to attempt to understand the relationship between the measure of Caring Principal Leadership that we developed and the additional variables that reflect teacher perceptions of the school’s caring for students who are placed at risk by society, the nature of teachers’ collective work, and student outcomes in the schools.

We first examined regression models with all variables and then investigated several plausible path models. The correlation matrix for survey variables included in the regressions (see the appendix) shows that there are significant positive correlations among all the variables. As expected, the highest correlations were between the two variables that were intended to measure caring: Caring Principal Leadership (for teachers) and Student Support (.59). The correlation between Student Support and Collective Responsibility was also quite high (.56), which supports our argument, outlined above, that it is a proxy measure for collective responsibility for creating a caring environment. None are, however, above .6, the “rule of thumb” for further assessment of whether the relationships may pose a threat to the stability of the analysis.

Regression Analysis

Regressions were conducted to address two questions: (1) Is principal caring related to teacher reports of academic support for students? (2) Is principal caring related to student achievement? In each of these regressions, we included measures of teachers’ professional work relationships and the two contextual variables of the poverty in students’ homes and school level.

The regression to answer the first question is shown in Table 6. The variables in the regression equation are significant with the exception of teacher collaboration and de-privatized practice. The standardized regression coefficients suggest that teachers’ perception of Caring Principal Leadership is the variable most strongly associated with their perception that the school provides strong academic support for students, with teachers’ reports of Collective Responsibility a close second. An examination of the standardized regression coefficients indicates that elementary school teachers report significantly higher levels of caring/supportive leadership than secondary school teachers, which was expected. Also notable is the significant but rather modest negative relationship between family poverty, measured by free and reduced-price lunch, and principal caring, which sustains the finding shown in the simple correlations in the appendix. This suggests that caring behavior on the part of principals is rather evenly distributed among schools with differing proportions of students in need.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 6.

Regression of Student Support on Principal Caring and Other Variables (N = 3,900).

	Standardized Coefficients, Beta	t	Sig.
(Constant)		−.187	.852
Caring Principal Leadership	.420	−31.543	.000
Teacher Collaboration	.017	−1.280	.201
De-privatized Practice	.006	−.442	.659
Collective Responsibility	.368	25.770	.000
Elementary School	.024	−1.951	.051
Percent of free/reduced-price lunch students	.061	4.979	.000
F = 552.850
R2 = .468

Table 7 presents the results of the regression of student achievement on the variables that were included in Table 6, with the addition of the Student Academic Support variable. The results are dramatically different from those in the previous regression. While the regression model again explains a reasonable percentage of the variance in achievement (38%), the largest standardized regression coefficients are family poverty and school level. Caring Principal Leadership remains significantly associated with achievement, but the standardized regression coefficient is not large (.04), and the standardized regression coefficient for Academic Support is only slightly higher (.06). ⁴ Of the teacher working relationship variables, only Collective Responsibility has a small but significant standardized regression coefficient (.05).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Table 7.

Regression of Student Achievement on Principal Caring, Student Support, and Other Variables.

	Standardized Coefficients, Beta	t	Sig.
(Constant)		48.637	.000
Caring Principal Leadership	.037	2.172	.030
Teacher Collaboration	.012	.758	.448
De-privatized Practice	.011	.731	.465
Collective Responsibility	.050	−2.857	.004
Student Academic Support	.064	−3.454	.001
Percent of free or reduced-lunch students	.551	−39.035	.000
Elementary School	.273	18.966	.000
F = 274.669
R2 = .348

In many ways, the findings presented in this table are difficult to interpret because we anticipated that caring, both principal caring and the caring that is reflected in the measure of Academic Support, would have a stronger relationship with achievement. We are thus led to considering a variety of alternatives that examine mediating effects using structural modeling.

Structural Equation Models

We first examined a relatively simple path model that mirrored implicit assumptions in our regression equations (and the literature): caring, whether Caring Principal Leadership —caring for teachers—or teachers caring for students by providing Academic Support, has a plausible relationship with tested student achievement. We also assume that, although the regression model shows a significant relationship with achievement, that any association between principal caring and student achievement is indirect. ⁵ We then considered family poverty and school level (an elementary dummy variable) as potentially affecting both caring and student achievement. The resulting path model was calculated using the AMOS program within SPSS and relied on a database where all variables were aggregated to the school mean, which resulted in an N of 134. The results, including the standardized regression weights, are presented in Figure 1. ⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Path model and coefficients with Principal Caring, Student Academic Support, and Student Achievement.

The path model meets standard assumptions of good model fit (RMSEA [root mean square of approximation] = .000, NFI [normed fit index] = .996). An examination of the model suggests a number of conclusions:

Caring Principal Leadership has a significant indirect association with student achievement because it is related to Academic Support for student learning (r = .72), which in turn is associated with Achievement (r = .20) with a total indirect path coefficient (PC-Academic Support-Achievement of .14).

Caring principals are more likely to be found in elementary schools.

Caring principals are less likely to be identified in higher poverty schools, suggesting a leadership disadvantage.

The presence of Caring Principal Leadership and Academic Support for student learning has, at best, a limited moderating effect on the association between student socioeconomic status and achievement, which is reduced from .55 in the regression model to .48 in the path model.

Student need, as measured by eligibility for free and reduced-price meals, remains the most important predictor of student test scores.

We also wished to explore the joint role of teachers’ professional working relationships and Caring Principal Leadership. In this model, we decided to include only the variable measuring Collective Responsibility, since it has stronger simple correlations with both student achievement and principal caring than de-privatized practice and showed relatively large standardized coefficients in Table 2. The model makes the assumption that the more responsibility teachers take on for the school’s effective operations, the more likely they are to participate in creating a strong support system for academic learning. In addition, it is assumed that principal caring will contribute to teacher collaboration, in large measure based on the research that suggests that principal behavior contributes significantly to the way in which teachers work together. We also included a direct link between principal caring and achievement to affirm the insignificance that was built in to the path presented in Figure 1. The results of the modified path analysis are shown in Figure 2.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Path model and coefficients with Principal Caring, Student Academic Support, Collective Responsibility, and Achievement.

While a bit more complex, this path model (RMSEA = .000; NFI = .993) affirms and expands on some of the insights from Figure 1. First, the role of caring in creating a school culture that supports achievement is still apparent although the total indirect effect is slightly lower (indirect path coefficient of PC-Academic Support-Achievement is .08). As anticipated, Caring Principal Leadership has a strong effect on Collective Responsibility as well as Academic Support for student learning. Second, the addition of Collective Responsibility does not result in a significant direct relationship with student achievement. Rather, its impact, like that of Principal Caring, is through its association with Academic Support (which, as we argued above, is a stronger measure of caring for disadvantaged students). Finally, we confirm that the variables that reflect the social organization of the school—caring, support, and collective responsibility—do not outweigh the powerful effects of the social demographics of the school.

We then examined a third model in which we substituted Teacher Collaboration for the variable of Collective Responsibility. The purpose of this model was to assess the degree to which teachers’ efforts to work together on instructional issues made an independent contribution to achievement over and above Principal Caring and Student Academic Support. The model was acceptable (RMSEA = .000; NFI = .975), and the results were very similar to Figure 2. ⁷ Teacher collaboration has no significant direct relationship with student achievement, but it has a modest effect through its relationship to student academic support, and the relationship between teacher collaboration and other variables in the path model is also similar. Overall, the results of the more complex models affirm the main findings that were noted in the simple model (Figure 1).

Discussion

As we noted at the start of this article, we are just beginning our conceptual and theory-building work on caring and caring school leadership. Yet, what we find, particularly in the case of our identification of the core elements of caring and some of the organizational conditions that enable it, provides a foundation on which to build. We have made an argument that the existing literature helps us understand how caring may function in schools and also points to what caring leadership might be and how it might function. We have focused, in particular, on the potential role of school leaders in creating environments of both press and support that are most conducive to student academic success and personal well-being.

The findings of our empirical analysis support our argument that caring is important in schools and contributes both to the development of more effective adult cultures and to student learning. Our results are consistent with the general literature on principal effects in that the influence of Caring Principal Leadership on student achievement is not direct but comes primarily through the development of Academic Support for student learning that exist at the school level. Our measure of Academic Support is, we argue, important because it reflects a particular kind of caring for students: the allocation of support to students who are most in need of it. The implication of this finding is that caring (by leaders) is reflected not simply in more caring dyadic personal relationships between teachers and students. Rather, it is also associated with a considered effort to distribute the most critical resources that a school has—teacher talent, time, and effort—toward the students who may need it most.

This makes sense theoretically, particularly in the ways in which school principals have at their disposal to express caring on a schoolwide basis. Principals, even in elementary schools, cannot interact in a deeply caring way with most students on a regular basis. They can, as we have argued, set expectations in a school that create mutual obligations to support all students and not just those who are “ready to learn,” and they can engage in regular acts of caring with individual students that model expectations for others. Principals can be instrumental in ensuring that students have equal opportunities to learn from the best teachers, receive the same quality of instruction, get the attention they need when they are struggling, and that resources are allocated to support students with the greatest needs. Allocating human resources and effort in a school setting requires, at minimum, passive agreement from teachers, whose engagement and motivation depend, at least in part, on the perception that the school is a fair and reasonable working environment (Louis et al., 2010). Thus, we suggest that that principal caring for teachers may create a climate in which teachers are more trusting of either formal or informal “equity audits” that focus less on “the gap” in outcomes than on internal inequities in policies and processes (Skrla, Scheurich, Garcia, & Nolly, 2004). Teachers may also be more willing to take a look at policies, processes, and even their own preferences for working with “easy” rather than “more difficult” students.

It makes sense that such supports derive from key elements of caring for teachers that is reflected in our measure of Caring Principal Leadership, notably from the knowledge and understanding of individual teachers’ needs and interests and the motivation to act on behalf of all. While we have not provided qualitative examples of how this might operate in practice, we think that it is plausible to argue that principals who care for teachers support the development of a culture that focuses, at least implicitly, on equity.

This does not imply that dyadic caring for students is not important, nor that student’s perception of being cared for (which is most likely to occur in situations of direct expressions of individual support from teachers or peers) is not the most powerful indicator of a caring culture for students. Equitable distribution of resources will likely seem meaningless to individual students if they do not see themselves in an environment in which their individual needs are not a priority. We assume, along with most of the theorists of caring, that the effects of caring will be lesser or even minimal if the one being cared for does not experience it as such. In other words, caring as an aspect of the organizational culture or climate, as revealed in policies and practices, adds to rather than supplants the importance of caring individual relationships.

Based on our conceptual arguments, we anticipated a positive relationship between Caring Principal Leadership, Collective Responsibility, and Teacher Collaboration, and we were surprised that the variables measuring how teachers work together showed no significant direct relationship to student achievement but contributed only indirectly through Academic Support. What this suggests is that a more equitable and transparent allocation of resources to support learning for all students may be a foundation for creating a school culture that is both professionally vibrant (a learning community) as well as meaningful and socially just—and that both may be dependent on a culture in which adults feel cared for by administrators.

It is certainly reasonable that principals’ caring for teachers, particularly their knowledge of teachers and their needs and interests, coupled with principals’ motivation to support teachers in their work, could occasion opportunities for teachers to converse with each other about a range of topics concerning less advantaged students and how to organize teaching and learning environments that would be more inclusive. We know that there is personal discomfort and resistance that emerge when individuals are asked to consider how their assumptions about practices that “work” may unconsciously disadvantage some students (McIntyre, 2002), and this may include well-established practices such as encouraging more experienced and content expert teachers to take the advanced classes or student groups. Leaders may confront assumptions and practices directly through equity training, or they may encourage teachers to make adjustments by simply creating more opportunities to discuss student learning and equity in teacher meetings. We do not know from our data if, in schools where principal caring was higher, this translates into more socially just support for students. However, we do see that there is a strong relationship with Collective Responsibility, which suggests that a caring culture for adults may generalize to a sense of responsibility for the welfare of others more generally. We also hypothesize that principal caring also creates a climate of personal safety, in which the risks associated with discussing how best to change classrooms and teacher instructional strategies to meet the needs of a more diverse student body are lessened. This would account for the relationship between Caring Principal Leadership, as measured at the school level, and Collaboration, which in our measure reflects teachers’ discussion about teaching.

Alternatively, our failure to find a relationship between measures of Collective Responsibility, Teacher Collaboration, and Achievement may say more about the importance of understanding the nature and quality of implicit teacher agreements about the limits of their responsibility rather than our measure of Collective Responsibility, which focuses largely on maintaining order and cohesiveness. The same may be said for our measure of Teacher Collaboration, which focuses on frequency rather than on depth and reflection. ⁸ Indeed, with regard to the focus of this article, this finding may point to the importance of understanding the extent to which these conversations are infused with elements of caring for students.

Ideally, a caring school culture should be reflected among students (in peer groups and in classrooms), teachers, nonprofessional staff, and leaders. The above discussion reveals an emergent perspective on how individual caring at any of these levels (dyads or small groups) may be translated into more organizationally caring cultures. First, we assume that dyadic/small-group caring relationships (e.g., between the principal and teachers, among teachers, or between teachers and students) create relational trust that enlarges the willingness of partners to tolerate or even enjoy new behaviors and ideas in others. In addition, we assume that caring relationships become increasingly mutual/reciprocal, whether these are among adults or between adults and children. Where many dyads are connected in a larger group (organization), the willingness to assume that the setting is a safe place where small failures can be “fixed” and people are engaged in difficult but collective work becomes generalized. This may, in turn, create additional opportunities for members to increase the school’s larger store of social capital that is associated with student learning (Goddard, 2003).

Caring, like other emotions in organizations, may be contagious, but it is also based on direct experience (Williams, 2007). Thus, a caring organizational culture requires a density of interactions that may create the basis for trust and reciprocity more broadly. Because leaders are often critical of developing denser networks within an organized setting, they bear much (but not all) of the responsibility for creating more caring cultures that can foster willingness to address issues of performance that often engender both individual and collective anxiety. ⁹

Will principal caring solve the pressing problem of inequitable practices and outcomes in schools? Our data suggest that they will play a modest role that deserves additional empirical attention. We anticipated the persistently strong relationship of the presence of students from low-income families with student achievement and the relatively limited moderating effect of caring on student achievement. At the same time, we are encouraged by our findings that even in schools with large proportions of low-income students, school-level academic supports and Caring Principal Leadership, through such supports, contribute in a positive and statistically significant way to student academic achievement. Perhaps leader caring provides a special kind of support for teachers who work in settings that are commonly associated with demoralization and burnout. On the other hand, our finding that a caring principal leadership is likely to be stronger in elementary schools than in secondary schools points to the challenge of how greater caring can be cultivated among administrators and teachers in organizational contexts that are larger, more complex structurally, and oriented toward subject matter.

When we introduced this analysis, we made the point that we were drawing on existing data, which limits our measures of caring. Nevertheless, we argue that our scale of Caring Principal Leadership is relatively robust with significant face validity, largely because it articulates the core dimensions of caring that were derived from the philosophical authors whose work on caring is well regarded. We point out, however, that it reflects a limited slice of principal caring, largely because it consists only of items that tap the principal’s relationship with teachers. Caring leadership is, in our view, a broader concept that must take into consideration caring for students (direct interactions that manifest a caring culture), caring for community (recognizing and respecting parent and community values and resources), and caring for a broader variety of student outcomes than those we were able to examine in this article.

In addition, the concept of caring leadership requires a deeper understanding of its possible expression through actions, interactions, and professional practices in multiple situations. Are particular practices grounded in deep and authentic knowledge and understanding of others, whether students or teachers? Are these practices motivated not by the self-interests of the leader but by a genuine concern to address the needs and interests of the other? And inasmuch as caring, as we have discussed it, is a quality of social relationships, we face challenges in considering how caring is translated into practices that foster both short- and long-term outcomes that benefit all members of the school and its community. In particular, the empirical data in this article alludes to only some of the direct outcomes of caring leadership and does not cover the much wider array that would be required to elaborate the benefits of caring leadership in schools, such as increased social integration or denser social capital, improved psychological states for members, increased capacity for caring on the part of members who experience caring, increased engagement with the school and its goals, and more learning on the part of students and teachers (Smylie, Murphy, & Louis, 2015). None of these are well captured by an outcome measure that is based on state-designed achievement tests.

Finally, the framework that we have developed from the literature focuses on “enabling conditions” for caring, and our analysis addresses only two of the factors that might inhibit the development of more potent caring relationships in schools, namely complexity (secondary schools vs. elementary schools) and poverty. We have alluded to others that deserve more attention, such as turnover among principals, which is rather high in U.S. schools, has a negative effect on student learning and also on teacher trust (Louis, Mayrowetz, Smylie, & Murphy, 2009; Mascall & Leithwood, 2010). Each time a principal leaves, the caring bonds that they have developed must be reestablished. Teacher turnover may have similar effects, as high turnover will disrupt connections among teachers that are likely to be central to maintaining a caring culture. Schools face traumatic disruptions from outside the school, from policy or funding changes to teacher contract conflicts that create internal controversy. We know, at this juncture, little about how to create resilient cultures of caring within schools, or about the conditions under which caring deteriorates.

In addition, although we have followed Anyon (2014) by emphasizing poverty as a mediator of social relationships in schools, we see the need for more research that addresses the issue of race/ethnicity. In particular, both sociological and psychological research suggest that teachers and administrators often hold unexamined biases that affect their “investments” in caring and support (Downey & Pribesh, 2004; Murray, Waas, & Murray, 2008). Claude Steele (2003) points out that in spite of these findings we still have limited understanding about how different social and psychological barriers account for the underachievement of African American students. There is, as Lynn and Parker (2006) point out, controversy over whether efforts to change the cultural understanding and proficiency of teachers would be a panacea, while other analyses suggest that the relationship of race and gender to student–teacher bonding is very complex (Crosnoe, Johnson, & Elder, 2004). Still, some common barriers, including deficit thinking, ignoring race, and lack of reflective dialogue or shared practice, have been noted in many studies (see, e.g., McKenzie & Scheurich, 2004).

Given the complexity of school environments, caring will, inevitably, face tradeoffs between the legitimate needs of different groups and the balance between various desirable short- and long-term goals. But, given the relative significance of the limited empirical findings that we present in this analysis, we argue that we must not shirk a deeper understanding of the importance of caring leadership for the improvement of schools.