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Education Leadership Initiative

About NASBE's Work in Education Leadership

In 2000, The Wallace Foundation launched a national initiative on education leadership to place quality leadership at the core of school reform. It has supported a range of efforts aimed at significantly improving student learning by strengthening the standards, training and performance of education leaders along with the conditions and incentives that affect their success. The focus has been to develop, test and share useful approaches for improving the training of education leaders and the conditions that support their ability to significantly lift student achievement across entire states and districts, especially in high-need schools. To that end, NASBE seeks to inform state boards of education on why leadership matters and how to exercise the specific policy levers under their authority to strengthen leaders’ knowledge and skills in improving student learning.

NASBE works in partnership with the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the National Governors' Association in helping states design cohesive leadership systems to ensure leaders are effective in improving student achievement. NASBE along with our national partners continues to work with state policymakers to leverage their political and legal authority towards the goal of improving education leadership.

States have brought together key players to challenge the status quo and craft systems for developing leaders that connect with the overall efforts to improve schools and advance student learning. The comprehensive assistance has lead to the implementation of policy frameworks grounded in research and proven practices and designed with the ultimate goal of raising student performance.

Promoting Effective Leadership

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The State Education Standard

September 2005

(Click here for expanded article list
and links to full text.)

 

 

Feature Articles

Education Leadership: The Essential Ingredient by The Staff of The Wallace Foundation. Lessons for improving leadership.

Educating School Leaders by Arthur Levine. How well do current leadership programs prepare leaders for today's jobs and today's schools?

Read more...

Education Leadership Publications and Resources

  • NASBE Leadership Website: Site highlighting state work in building cohesive leadership systems and the connected set of policies and structures that govern the preparation and ongoing development of school leaders. (ongoing updates)
  • Research Findings to Support Effective Education Policymaking: Wallace research perspective developed to help policymakers respond to new federal education priorities, including the Race to the Top grants program. The piece synthesizes more than a decade of the Foundation's experience in education leadership as well as out-of-school time learning and arts education. (September 2009)
  • Building the Capacity of State Education Agencies to Support Schools: Policy update detailing the growing need for state education agencies (SEAs) to create the capacity needed to dramatically improve public education. SEAs face the challenges of added responsibility--in areas such as state accountability and school turnaround--within the context of a down economy. (February 2009)
  • Leveraging Leadership Development through Principal Evaluation: Policy update considering how policymakers can build systems that ensure high-quality leadership in every school and use evaluations as a strategic lever to advance learning-centered leadership and improve school performance. (February 2008)
  • Teacher Leadership: Policy update explaining a new paradigm of school leadership: a distributive model that cultivates the resource of teacher leaders to meet the realities and demands of school reform and instructional improvement. (December 2008)
  • The State Role in Preparing School Leaders: Policy update describing research and strategies for states to consider while building cohesive leadership systems such as co-design and co-delivery of preparation programs between states and districts, accountability structures for training programs, and recruitment and selection standards. (August 2007)
  • Leading Change Handbook: Wallace-developed toolkit developed to help leaders use six tools translate concepts into actions, continuous improvements, and sustainable results in the following areas of the change process: assessing and improving participants' readiness; engaging stakeholders; planning "early wins;" minimizing resistance; using collaborative planning methods; and developing ways to bring initiatives to scale and sustain them over time. (June 2009)
  • Assessing the Effectiveness of School Leaders: New Directions and New Processes: Wallace research perspective concluding that most assessments of school leaders in use today are not as focused on learning as they should be, nor are they effective in gathering reliable facts about how leaders' behaviors are or are not promoting learning. Moving forward, the piece describes what a new direction in leader assessment would assess and how. (March 2009)

(Click title to download publication or go to website for download.)


 

More Articles...