Providing high-quality, accessible professional development to all teachers and principals is a critical component of the professional development plan funded by North Carolina’s federal Race to the Top (RttT) grant. One key professional development program funded through RttT is the Distinguished Leadership in Practice (DLP) program. The DLP initiative employs a non-traditional professional development model. Participants examine the meaning and application of school leadership through a problem-based approach delivered via a series of face-to-face, regional, cohort-based sessions, supplemented by online activities. Throughout the year-long experience, practicing North Carolina principals are coached using a continuous improvement model. Participating principals are provided with models of exemplary school leadership, which allows them to study the behaviors, attitudes, and competencies that define a distinguished school leader. The DLP experience is built around six components:

This report will seek to identify the longer-term and distal outcomes of DLP Cohort 2 participants (2011-12) using a mixed-methods approach, and will include additional data sources to better triangulate self-reported findings documented in prior reports. Longer-term administrative data will be used in conjunction with surveys of personnel in schools of past DLP participants to identify the impacts of the DLP program following principals’ participation. In the 2013-14 annual report, the evaluation will seek to assess the impact that the program has on the culture/climate and on student performance at participating principals’ schools. Specifically, the evaluation will address the following questions moving forward (prior reports addressed evaluation questions I-V):

VI. Long-Term Outcomes: What was the impact of the principals’ participation in DLP on their schools’ culture/climate?

VII. Distal Outcomes: To what extent are gains in student performance outcomes associated with principals’ participation in DLP?

Culture/climate will be identified using the biannual North Carolina Teacher Working Conditions Survey and many response items in the RttT Omnibus Survey, administered to a representative sample of North Carolina’s schools and the teachers there. The evaluation also will supplement these survey responses with phone interviews with a small, purposefully selected subset of past participants’ schools to identify the perspectives of the principals following participation. This new data collection effort and analyses will allow the Evaluation Team to identify the long-term impacts and sustainability of the DLP program. The report will also address subgroup differences in the program’s effectiveness by comparing the long-term and distal outcomes by: principals of different experience, schools with different levels of economic disadvantage, and by school size. Policy implications will conclude the report and will be based on the cumulative site visits, survey data, qualitative findings, and analysis of longitudinal administrative data.