education

Education

Effective education leadership makes a difference in improving learning. There’s nothing new or especially controversial about that idea. What’s far less clear, even after several decades of school renewal efforts, is just how leadership matters, how important those effects are in promoting the learning of all children, and what the essential ingredients of successful leadership are. Lacking solid evidence to answer these questions, those who have sought to make the case for greater attention and investment in leadership as a pathway for large-scale education improvement have had to rely more on faith than fact. This report by researchers from the Universities of Minnesota and Toronto examines the available evidence and offers educators, policymakers and all citizens interested in promoting successfulschools, some answers to these vitally important questions. It is the first in a series of such publications commissioned by The Wallace Foundation that will probe the role of leadership in improving learning. It turns out that leadership not only matters: it is second only to teaching among school-related factors in its impact on student learning, according to the evidence compiled and analyzed M. Christine DeVita President The Wallace Foundation by the authors. And, say the authors, the impact of leadership tends to be greatest in schools where the learning needs of students are most acute. How do high-quality leaders achieve this impact? By setting directions – charting a clear course that everyone understands, establishing high expectations and using data to track progress and performance. By developing people – providing teachers and others in the system with the necessary support and training to succeed. And by making the organization work – ensuring that the entire range of conditions and incentives in districts and schools fully supports rather than inhibits teaching and learning. There is still much more to learn about the essentials of quality leadership, how to harness its benefits, and howto ensure that we don’t continue to throw good leaders into bad systems that will grind down even the best of them. I’m confident that the knowledge in this report, and subsequent publications by this team of researchers, will help lead to more effective policy and practice at a time of fully justified publicimpatience for school improvement.

Conclusion There seems little doubt that both district and school leadership provides a critical bridge between most educational-reform initiatives, and having those reforms make a genuine difference for all students. Such leadership comes from many sources, not just superintendents and principals. But those in formal positions of authority in school systems are likely still the most influential. Efforts to improve their recruitment, training, evaluation and ongoing development should be considered highly cost-effective approaches to successful school improvement. These efforts will be increasingly productive as research provides us with more robust understandings of how successful leaders make sense of and productively respond to both external policy initiatives and local needs and priorities. Such efforts will also benefit considerably from more fine-grained understandings than we currently have of successful leadership practices; and much richer appreciations of how those practices seep into the fabric of the education system, improving its overall quality and substantially adding value to our students’ learning.