The RAND Corporation did a synthesis of the evidence on school leadership efforts to inform the use of school leadership activities and interventions under ESSA.

The review of the evidence is framed by ESSA funding streams and evidence requirements. The authors reviewed activities that fit the ESSA funding stream definitions. They conducted two waves of literature searches, adding terms and intervention names from the initial review to the second wave. They identified and prescreened more than 3,500 articles based on their titles, conducted a two-stage screening of more than 500 articles based on their abstracts, and fully reviewed 128 articles. For the final stage, two coders reviewed each article, and senior staff reconciled any differences. By the end of this process, studies that are reported here were examined by five researchers.