The Wallace Foundation published an initiative publication, that can be downloaded by clicking the following link: Education Leadership: A Bridge to School Reform

As one New York City principal recently put it, “It is not just about being an administrator, it’s about being instructional leaders.”

Improving leadership has been the sole focus of The Wallace Foundation’s education efforts since 2000. And it was the theme of Wallace’s most recent national education conference, titled “A Bridge to School Reform,” held in New York City on October 22-24, 2007, that brought together some 425 participants including governors, mayors, superintendents, princi­pals, researchers, journalists, field leaders and influencers.

Again and again, the conference highlighted what experience to date has taught us: that in order to get the leaders we want and need in every school, it’s not enough to improve their training, as urgent as that is. States and districts also need to create:

· Standards that spell out clear expectations about what leaders need to know and do to improve instruction and learning and that form the basis for holding them ac­countable for results; and

· Conditions and incentives that support the ability of leaders to meet those standards. These include the availability of data to inform leaders’ decisions; the authority to direct needed resources to the schools and students with the greatest needs; and poli­cies that affect the recruitment, hiring, placement and evaluation of school leaders.

Each of these core elements for better education leadership is vital. But what is equally impor­tant is that states and districts need to work much more closely together in creating more sup­portive leadership standards, training and conditions. To create, in other words, what we’ve come to call a cohesive leadership system.

Thus a core theme in this conference was that collective action by states and districts, rather than isolated or uncoordinated efforts on single elements of leadership improvement, is the most likely pathway to lasting, system wide change. And at this conference, we heard examples of how such a cohesive system is beginning to emerge in states like Iowa, Delaware and Mas­sachusetts, and in districts like New York City and Atlanta. A number of these examples are discussed in the pages that follow.

Yet we also heard many reminders that such collaboration has not been the historic norm in education policy. Efforts at state-district policy coordination remain relatively new, and are yielding both early successes and cautionary lessons about the challenges of maintaining the momentum of positive change. Until we see more examples of broad, coordinated action and distill the lessons from those efforts, we are almost certain to continue to hear many princi­pals complain that they have to fight a calcified and often-unfriendly system to achieve the high expectations being placed on them by an increasingly impatient nation.

The discussions about the successes and practical challenges of education leadership improve­ment efforts at our national conference were rich, relevant and refreshingly candid. While it’s impossible to recount them all, this brief publication offers highlights from those discussions as well as detailed excerpts from several of the keynote addresses.

“States and districts need to work much more closely together in creating more supportive leadership standards, training and conditions.”

The report opens with a com­mentary by M. Christine DeVita, president of The Wallace Foundation, who describes the progress to date of the foundation’s education leadership initiative and the key lessons learned. As she observed, “The national conversation has shifted from `whether’ leadership really matters or is worth the investment, to ‘how’ – how to train, place and support high-quality leadership where it’s needed the most: in the schools and districts where failure remains at epidemic levels.”

Richard Colvin, the distinguished education journalist and director of The Hechinger In­stitute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University, served as the conference rapporteur. His essay provides specific highlights from the meeting about how states, districts and university leaders are grappling with the challenges of education leader­ship improvement.

Finally, this report contains extended excerpts from two of the conference’s keynote speakers:

• Linda Darling-Hammond, Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University, who outlined the elements of effective school leadership training that emerged from her recently-published research on exemplary preparation programs1; and
• Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based education and child advocacy organization, who provided vivid examples of how no-nonsense school and district leaders are making the critical difference in proving that children from even the most disadvantaged urban and rural backgrounds can excel as learners.

Readers who wish to learn more about education leadership issues are encouraged to visit the Knowledge Center at The Wallace Foundation website, www.wallacefoundation.org.

1 Linda Darling-Hammond, Michelle LaPointe, Debra Meyerson, Margaret Orr, and Carol Cohen, Preparing School Leaders for a Changing World: Lessons from Exemplary Programs, Stanford, CA: Stanford Educational Leadership Institute, 2007