Rather than asking students to memorize rote recipes for action, this new book enhances students' ability to encounter new situations, assess relevant factors and decide on effective courses of action on their own. It offers valuable vicarious experiences and insights by combining case studies of actual beginning superintendents with analyses by experienced, knowledgeable professors of educational administration.
Bridge the great divide between distanced administrative duties and daily classroom impact. This book introduces a top-down power mechanism called defined autonomy, a concept that focuses on district-defined, nonnegotiable, common goals and a system of accountability supported by assessment tools. Defined autonomy creates an effective balance of centralized direction and individualized empowerment that allows building-level staff the stylistic freedom to respond quickly and effectively to student failure.
The Challenge for School Leaders identifies essential systems and their elements that enhance the school leader’s knowledge and skill to continually improve the academic program through a faculty collaborative process. The critical systems addressed are system elements, communication, curriculum, instruction, assessment, and collaborative decision making to determine causes of nonproductive systems and solutions to remove and solve these issues. The text includes a pre- and post-school assessment survey process that involves the faculty and administrators in evaluating their school, and identifying critical areas that need improvement. This survey has been statistically affirmed for high reliability and validity with respect to academic system behaviors correlated with high academic student performance. The continual improvement philosophy is the foundation of this text and collaboration is the method by which this concept is achieved. The value of each person is critical, and everyone is needed to improve the academic systems to serve the needs of the students and the faculty. The communication linkage system as well as curriculum-instruction-assessment integration is addressed and is essential to the improvement process. The analysis and improvement of the instructional process is the key to enhancing student academic performance. The concepts and practical suggestions along with the knowledge and skills to build an effective academic system for students is the aim of this study.
Managing School Districts for High Performance brings together more than twenty case studies and other readings that offer a powerful and transformative approach to advancing and sustaining the work of school improvement. At the center of this work is the concept of organizational coherence: aligning organizational design, human capital management, resource allocation, and accountability and performance improvement systems to support an overarching strategy. This central idea provides a valuable conceptual framework for current and future school leaders. The case studies presented in Managing School Districts for High Performance grow out of the Public Education Leadership Project (PELP), a unique partnership between the Harvard Business School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and a network of urban school districts. This rich array of cases explores the managerial challenges districts face as they seek to ensure rich learning opportunities and high achievement for all students across a system of schools. "This book of insightful case studies fills a void long felt by educational administrators in search of practical, real-world training tools. It will serve as a catalyst for the tough conversations district leaders need to have about achieving high-quality outcomes for all students. The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems has used many of these cases with great success, and we are excited that they are now compiled into a single collection." -- Dan Katzir, Managing Director, The Broad Foundation "This volume is not a treatise about how schools and districts should work. Rather, it provides a deep immersion in the real dilemmas involved in advancing school district reform. Anyone who works through these cases cannot help but come away with a more informed vision for change, a more reflective orientation about the interrelationships among the multiple tasks involved, and a more prudent grasp of what it takes to educate all children to high academic standards. The course of study presented by Managing School Districts for High Performance should be required professional education for anyone charged with advancing a coherent agenda of school improvement in our diverse, demanding, and rapidly changing society." -- Anthony S. Bryk, Spencer Professor of Organizational Studies, Stanford University "This set of case studies offers practitioners, policymakers, and scholars the opportunity to learn from the collective wisdom and real-life experiences of educational leaders involved in systemic transformation. Implementing coherent reform strategies designed to improve and sustain student performance often takes place in a vacuum. As a former urban superintendent, I believe that these selected educational case studies provide a compelling forum for shared experiential teaching and learning." -- Arlene Ackerman, Christian A. Johnson Professor of Outstanding Educational Practice, Teachers College, Columbia University "This collaboration between the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education provides a set of analytical tools to address the most complex and challenging issues facing urban public schools. The contemporary case studies document actual choices and constraints and point to patterns and similarities across organizations, from urban schools to corporate environments." -- Carol Johnson, Superintendent, Boston Public Schools Stacy Childress is a lecturer at Harvard Business School. Richard F. Elmore is the Gregory R. Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Allen S. Grossman is the MBA Class of 1957 Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. Susan Moore Johnson is the Pforzheimer Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
School District Leadership Matters challenges policy makers, administrators, and academics in the field of educational leadership to reassess their traditional approaches to learning, working, and planning. The authors believe that government restructuring, standards-based reforms, and centrally imposed strategic planning have been painfully ineffective. As a consequence, student learning has become increasingly superficial and inauthentic. This book bridges the traditional divide between the generalizations of social science theory on the one hand and the world of educational practice on the other. It argues that a more promising approach to education reform is through effective school district leadership. Sheppard, Brown and Dibbon draw on their collective experience both as educational leaders and researchers of leadership, having spent five years researching and working in one school district. Here, they show how a district superintendent can successfully navigate the paradoxes and challenges of facilitating collaborative leadership in a school district with a traditionally hierarchical organizational structure. As a conclusion to their work, the authors highlight what they call five ‘recognitions’ that deepen readers’ understanding of school district leadership. They illuminate, too, ways that senior level practitioners can apply theory to practice in order to break down the traditional hierarchical bureaucracies that inhibit learning, and create professional learning communities. School District Leadership Matters urges researchers, graduate students, practitioners, and policymakers to focus on improving authentic learning for all students and argues that the best hope rests with effective school district leadership. This empirically-based yet practical book provides new insights and questions for academic researchers and will inspire policy makers and practitioners to imagine what could be and to work towards it.
Leadership in America’s Best Urban Schools describes and demystifies the qualities that successful leaders rely on to make a difference at all levels of urban school leadership. Grounded in research, this volume reveals the multiple challenges that real urban elementary, middle, and high schools face as well as the catalysts for improvement. This insightful resource explores the critical leadership characteristics found in high-performing urban schools and gives leaders the tools to move their schools to higher levels of achievement for all students—but especially for those who are low-income, English-language learners, and from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. In shining a light on the essential qualities for exceptional leadership at all levels of urban schools, this book is a valuable guide for all educators and administrators to nurture, influence, support, and sustain excellence and equity at their schools.
Children in today's world are inundated with information about who to be, what to do and how to live. But what if there was a way to teach children how to manage priorities, focus on goals and be a positive influence on the world around them? The Leader in Meis that programme. It's based on a hugely successful initiative carried out at the A.B. Combs Elementary School in North Carolina. To hear the parents of A. B Combs talk about the school is to be amazed. In 1999, the school debuted a programme that taught The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Peopleto a pilot group of students. The parents reported an incredible change in their children, who blossomed under the programme. By the end of the following year the average end-of-grade scores had leapt from 84 to 94. This book will launch the message onto a much larger platform. Stephen R. Covey takes the 7 Habits, that have already changed the lives of millions of people, and shows how children can use them as they develop. Those habits -- be proactive, begin with the end in mind, put first things first, think win-win, seek to understand and then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw -- are critical skills to learn at a young age and bring incredible results, proving that it's never too early to teach someone how to live well.
A volume in International Research on School Leadership Series Editors: Alex J. Bowers, Teachers College- Columbia University; Alan R. Shoho, University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee; Bruce G. Barnett, University of Texas at San Antonio As the sixth volume in the International Research on School Leadership series, the contributing authors in this volume consider the history, challenges, and opportunities of the field of research and practice in educational leadership and administration in schools and districts. Ten years after the work of Firestone and Riehl (2005) and their contributing authors, our aim with the present volume was to summarize and update the work of the field, and provide a space to consider the multiple futures of educational leadership in schools and districts, as both challenges and opportunities. The first decade of the twenty‐first century brought significant critiques, challenges, and competition to the research and practice of training leaders and administrators of schools and districts around the world. Congruently, the field experienced significant growth and change, as multiple new sub‐domains flourished and were founded. Thus, in this volume we were delighted to included excellent chapters from multiple authors that considered the duality of the challenges and opportunities of: The work of the field of educational leadership and administration research to date. The opportunities and challenges of new visions of leadership in traditional and non‐traditional schools. The evolving state of research evidence in educational leadership and the increasing sophistication of multiple methodologies, including qualitative research, quantitative modeling, the ability to test theory, and the increasing opportunities brought on by the intersection of data, research, and practice. The preparation of educational leaders. And the emerging trends in the professional development of school leaders.
For many years, the authors have been fellow travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. Their first coauthored book focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership and addresses how individual teachers can be most effective in leading students—by learning with colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms
Despite the rising interest in school districts, there are relatively few comprehensive resources available for graduate students in educational leadership programs. The Challenges of School District Leadership takes the position that the best way to prepare the next generation of school district leaders is to make certain that they are prepared to address the unending challenges that characterize public education today. Drawing on the latest research as well as actual examples, the book spotlights ten of the perennial challenges facing superintendents and school boards. Among the challenges discussed in detail are balancing equity and excellence, accommodating demographic change, coping with the increasing politicization of district leadership, deciding how to organize (or reorganize) a school system, and meeting the demands of educational accountability. This text is appropriate for graduate students in educational leadership, education policy, and the politics of education as well as school district leaders.
