School leaders are critical in the lives of students and to the development of their teachers. Unfortunately, in too many instances, principals are effective in spite of – rather than because of – district conditions. To truly improve student achievement for all students across the country, well-prepared principals need the tools, support, and culture that enable them to be the best.
New Leaders and the Bush Institute’s Alliance to Reform Educational Leadership (AREL) launched the Conditions for Effective Leadership Project and partnered with leading researchers and practitioners to generate a comprehensive and research-based framework outlining the conditions necessary for transformational school leaders to succeed. Based on results from the Conditions for Effective Leadership Project, which included more than 20 education and leadership experts brought together by the Bush Institute and New Leaders, Great Principals at Scale: Creating District Conditions That Enable All Principals to Be Effective offers a framework of conditions that can help districts enable great school leadership. The Great Principals at Scale Toolkit was developed to help school system leaders assess their current leadership conditions and offers ways to improve those conditions to drive student achievement gains.
FINDINGS
The report provides a framework to describe the set of conditions that effective school systems have in place that enable principals to be successful:
* Strand 1: Alignment among goals, strategies, structures, and resources, so that the work of every staff member in the district is supporting system-wide goals focused on increasing student achievement;
* Strand 2: Culture of collective responsibility, balanced autonomy, and continuous learning and improvement;
* Strand 3: Effective management and support for principals with on-going opportunities for development and feedback-and most notably, roles and responsibilities that are feasible; and
* Strand 4: Systems and policies to effectively manage talent at the school-level.
For more information, please visit:
http://www.newleaders.org/newsreports/great-principals-at-scale/
