Effective school-level leaders impact student achievement. McREL's analysis of research found that effective leadership is not about leader personality or style; rather, it's about a set of 21 specific actions and behaviors that are significantly associated with higher levels of student achievement. This report translates the 21 actions into a…

In 1966, the Coleman report assessed conditions in U.S. schools and identified barriers that prevented Black students from accessing high-quality education. Since that time--and despite federal efforts to close gaps in achievement between students who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC) and their White peers--not much has changed.…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to test the effects of nine district characteristics on student achievement, explored the conditions that mediated the effects of such characteristics and contributed to understandings about the role school-level leaders play in district efforts to improve achievement. Design/methodology/approach: Data for the…

Strategic resourcing is an important goal for K-12 policymakers hoping to better ensure that financial investments result in high-quality instruction and student achievement. But it's a topic where research evidence and district practices are still evolving. Given the emergence of new practices and challenges, data on districts' purchasing…

School leaders play a vital role in ensuring student achievement. In fact, they are second only to classroom instruction. All too often, however, principals are immersed in administrative duties with little time or training to become true leaders of learning who can shape the success of a school. This dissertation focuses on the need for central…

Students With Disabilities (SWD) typically underperform compared to their non-disabled peers; these gaps are often widened by poverty, race or ethnicity, and English language proficiency. Principals are often unprepared to meet their learning needs. This mixed methods study took place in the Westford Central School District, a pseudonym, a high…

Realizing their coaching program was not having desired effects for teachers or for students' achievement, leaders in the Manor School District in Texas revamped the district's coaching program. They created two "communities" encompassing all coaches in the district (since district schools were each doing their own thing with regard to…

This article reports on a study that investigated how collaborative leadership can influence sustained learner academic performance in secondary schools. The key problem resounds about secondary schools that are unable either to sustain or improve learner academic performance when intervention strategies rolled out from the district offices are…

The purpose of this study was to examine administrators' use of data, their perceptions of data, and what their expectations were in terms of teacher use of data. In conjunction with this examination will be a closer look at the new Professional Standards for Educational Leaders (PSEL) to determine the connections as well as the disconnections to…

In a learning system, central office personnel assume collective responsibility for schools and go about their work very differently. They are responsible not only for departments and programs, but also for student learning. They demonstrate that responsibility by engaging in data informed conversations about student achievement. Central office…

We apply a utilization-focused evaluation [UFE] approach to an evaluation of Virginia's latest comprehensive accountability policy--the Standards of Accreditation (SOA). Our study focuses on the implementation experiences of district and high school level administrators in four urban districts. This study is significant in two important ways.…

No longer is the central office a place for educators' careers to meet a dead end. Nor can it be where ineffective leaders are transferred to lessen impact. It cannot be "the blob," as coined by William Bennett (Walker, 1987). The Wallace Foundation notes that the central office has never been more important for system and individual…

Public school districts are locally controlled and funded through local property taxes. Funding schools this way perpetuates structural inequities in poorer school districts and as a result, students living in poverty have minimal access to critical resources that support student learning. Community schools are resurfacing in many of these urban…

Objective of the Case--There is a large volume of theoretical and "how to" literature on professional learning communities (PLCs), but little documenting the challenges of implementation and even less on the challenges of system-wide implementation of PLCs. This case is about the role of the central office in initiating and supporting…

Educational leadership coaching is a job-embedded, school-based form of professional development and an approach to transformational conversations that has the potential to change school cultures and improve student achievement (Stevenson, 2009). In this type of professional development, conversations and reflective questions guide educational…