Virginia Principals and School Law

Abstract

This quantitative study examined the level of school law knowledge possessed by secondary principals and assistant principals in Virginia public schools, including its relationships to the type, length, quantity, and recency of their law-related professional preparation and training, and years of administrative experience. The following questions guided this study: 1) What is the relationship, if any, between the principals' actual knowledge of school law and their self-reported confidence in their understanding of school law? 2)What is the relationship, if any, between the principals' knowledge of school law and the kind of school law preparation received? (College course, school system workshop, non-school system seminar, other)? 3) What is the relationship, if any, between the principals' knowledge of school law in relation to the length/quantity of preparation received? (semester, quarter, three weeks minimum, one day or less, other)? 4) What is the relationship, if any, between the principals' knowledge of school law and the recency of school law preparation? 5)What is the relationship, if any, between the principals' knowledge of school law and the years of administrative experience held? Findings that came out of this research include: 1) Virginia secondary principals and assistant principals demonstrated moderately high overall school-law knowledge. 2) Virginia high and middle school secondary principals and assistant principals demonstrated major overconfidence on two legal topics. 3) Virginia secondary principals and assistant principals reported relatively high confidence in their school-law knowledge, yet this confidence showed little relationship to actual performance. 4) Virginia secondary principals and assistant principals demonstrated good alignment on the specific topic of warrantless searches of cell phones, with low knowledge scores corresponding to appropriately low confidence levels. 5) The type of school-law preparation received was not significantly related to knowledge scores. 6) Due to extreme skew in the data, the relationship between the length or quantity of school-law preparation and knowledge scores could not be meaningfully tested. 7) Neither the recency of school-law preparation nor years of administrative experience was significantly related to knowledge scores.