For over two decades, NIET has been dedicated to building educator excellence to enhance student success by supporting states, districts, schools, and educator preparation programs in recruiting, developing, and retaining educators. The first section of the 2023-24 NIET Research Summary presents highlights from five recent studies that align with…

High-quality professional learning can build principals' capacity to lead successful schools. This brief summarizes a study about principals' professional learning based on a national survey of elementary school principals. Many surveyed principals reported that they had access to professional development that has been identified as important for…

Many principal supervisors in the United States work in relative isolation and experience no professional development designed to support them. Over the past four years, the role of principal supervisor in Long Beach Unified School District in California has shifted from compliance and at-a-distance supervision practices to a deeply rooted…

The role of the public school principal has expanded dramatically in recent decades. The expanded role means they are now significant multipliers of effective teaching and have a real opportunity to affect student achievement. Most states have spent recent years working to improve teacher effectiveness, recognizing its importance in improving…

California's new accountability system originated in the radical decentralization of power and authority from Sacramento to local schools and their communities brought about by the Legislature's adoption of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) in 2013. Under California's previous accountability policies and the federal "No Child Left…

Decades of research find that effective school leadership and access to high-quality early education are two of the most important determinants of educational outcomes. School principals affect both teacher and student performance and play an important role in turning around troubled schools. High-quality education, from prekindergarten (pre-K)…

Most special education administrators do not get the chance to network regularly with professional peers to discuss job challenges and strategies. School-district special education directors routinely juggle complex, difficult, time-consuming, and emotion-laden job demands, but when things get tough, they usually find themselves solving problems…

How can we prepare practicing and aspiring education leaders for the complex, adaptive challenges they face? In "Helping Educators Grow," Eleanor Drago-Severson presents a new approach to leadership development. Too often, she argues, we teach leadership development the same way we teach world history: just the facts. Instead, we need to…

How can managers prepare for extreme but exceptional events and for the challenge of managing complexity and uncertainty in their daily business? Confronted with the challenge of achieving high and reliable performance in risk-prone, fast-paced, and unpredictable environments, managers and management scholars can learn a lot from the organizing…

We explain in this article the need for board training in rural America irrespective of industry or government sector. We discuss how an assessment of training needs has led to the launch of a new project called the National Board Basics Curriculum (NBBC) project. In this project, we have identified four key core competencies that every board…