Principals' Choice: Student Classroom Placement

The nature of success and chance in education has driven the researcher to review principals’ processes for assigning students to classrooms in Indiana schools. The complex process of placing students with teachers is a major structural procedure principals integrate each year. After a review of the literature on classroom assignment practices, the researcher noted a gap in the field of research, particularly with an instrument to review assignment practices. The study’s purpose was to create a reliable and valid instrument for gleaning information on principals’ assignment practices. The decisions that principals make regarding classroom composition have been shown to influence learning for students (Bosworth & Caliendo, 2007; Lazear, 2001) and can create bias and undesirable results for groups of students (Kalogrides et al., 2003). The created instrument allows principals, school teams, and district-level teams to review their placement practices regarding four areas: principals’ process of placement, the people involved in the assignment process, student grouping, and student characteristics. The instrument supports the opportunity to discover more equitable practices as current practices have been shown to be inequitable for various student and teacher groups (Hawkins, 2017; Kalogrides, 2013; & Redding, 2019). The instrument has the potential to support further research on the statistical significance of specific assignment practices and student achievement.