School administrators serve as instructional leaders and set the tone for the culture of a school. The principal’s influence is pivotal. In this month’s issue brief, we explore effective school leadership and recommendations for improving the training, support and evaluation of educational leaders. What essential skills should principals master in Read more
How can school districts build a large corps of highly qualified principals? Making sure that would-be principals get the right training is one step; providing new principals with plenty of support is another. A new report describes what those two steps look like in six urban school districts working to Read more
What can school districts do to ensure that schools have the best principals? Deanna Burney and Robert Hughes, writing for the Harvard Education Letter, propose that districts create a growth-oriented system of principal professional development and certification and tie this system to principal evaluation. Following is the basic idea for Read more
Principals are the primary agents of change in schools, and their effectiveness as leaders plays a key role in improving student achievement, a new report from New Leaders finds. The report, “Change Agents: How States Can Develop Effective School Leaders,” encourages states to develop a pipeline for attracting and retaining Read more
Is there a policy disconnect surrounding teacher evaluation? In a commentary published in Education Week, Stephen Fink, executive director of the University of Washington Center for Educational Leadership, argues that how we use the new evaluation tools will determine whether we simply create the aura of accountability or actually help Read more
We know that principal leadership is crucial to success of schools and students, particularly urban ones, but the Wallace Foundation’s new report, Districts Matter, adds that school districts can cultivate that strong leadership and “ensure they have principals capable of boosting teaching and learning.” The new report “draws on a Read more
Yet another report on school reform has urged reform in the area of school leadership. This report, entitled, “Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership” and produced by the George W. Bush Institute and the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership. What Read more
Frederick M. Hess and Andrew P. Kelly urge a more “measured approach to education reform” from the federal level in their report, What Uncle Sam Can (and cannot) do to Improve K-12 Schooling: Lessons for the next Four Years. The introduction to the report offers a mixed review of the Read more
Principals preparing for Common Core implementation have a new set of action briefs at their disposal. Achieve, in partnership with College Summit, the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), and the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP), has released a series of action briefs on the role of Read more
Education Department Secretary Arne Duncan, in a press conference with the Council of Chief State School Officers last week, implied that he would continue as President Obama’s education secretary for another four years and would continue the course set in the last four years. Duncan’s remarks to the CCSSO were Read more
Discussions about human capital and school improvement typically center on teachers. Yet the principals who select those teachers are a critical driver of school success. Just as states are beginning to address the weaknesses in their principal pipelines, a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) offers Read more