The Inner Principal (Student Outcomes and the Reform of Education)

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In some ways, the pursuit of urban school reform has become symbolically tantamount to constructing paths necessary to enable more children to realize a quintessential American dream of prosperity, stability, and security. Despite such apparent unanimity regarding the importance of city schools, essential reform actors have engaged in intense disputes over the proper structural and systemic alterations necessary to improve education. Often at issue has been the notion of just who should and will control change efforts; politics, in various forms, appears as a necessary condition and inevitable calculation in urban school reform.

Moreover, vexing tensions also have characterized the enacted improvement initiatives. This article provides an introduction to urban school reform in the United States, with particular emphasis on how it has progressed since the s. I begin with a brief historical overview that provides a general sense of context and terrain. Given the limited length of this work, my main intent is conceptual rather than comprehensive.

Accordingly, I describe three key concepts—certain factors consistently matter, the outsider issue, and the cyclical nature of reform—that have helped define urban school reform over the past several decades. I also discuss several enduring reform tensions that have remained unresolved in city school improvement efforts. In spite of these tensions, faith in urban school reform has persisted, thanks to exemplary city schools and programs that have helped students thrive academically. For many reformers, such educational success stories demonstrate viable routes toward enabling academic achievement for more children living in urban areas indeed exist, thereby helping sustain the impulse to reform urban schools.

As the United States began emerging as an urbanized, industrialized global power in the late s, city schools became a focal point for change. The consolidation of rural schools into city districts led alliances of business representatives and educational professionals to develop complex educational systems marked by increased specialization of pedagogical and support functions Rury, ; Tyack, One main purpose was assimilation of the increasing number of immigrants arriving in cities. By the latter half of the century, urban educational bureaucracies in places like New York City struck some observers as Byzantine empires that perpetuated the entitlements of existing professional educators and solidified the status quo in terms of educational services delivered and withheld Rogers, After World War II, African American migration from the South to northern cities, as well as influxes of new immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, preceded urban deindustrialization and increased suburbanization in the s and s.

Complicating matters, after the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in rendered school segregation unconstitutional, efforts to desegregate city schools attacked de jure by law segregation in the South and de facto in effect segregation elsewhere. As educational historian John Rury explained, by the s:. Destitution and isolation contributed to an atmosphere of nihilistic self-destruction. In this fashion, the crisis in education can be linked to the economic crisis in inner-city minority communities.

In cities across the United States, socioeconomic and demographic change has had profound effects on urban schools and schooling Anyon, ; Cuban, Amid such stark community realities, actors across the sociopolitical spectrum began to frame schools as central elements of the problems plaguing cities. Meanwhile, scholars questioned the degree to which schools could help youth overcome the effects of poverty, race, and other socioeconomic factors Coleman et al. As a consensus was emerging that urban schools were dysfunctional studies like these suggested that they were also ineffective tools for increasing equity and social justice for students of color.

By the late s, as educational policymakers and others responded to this troubling context, enduring contours also emerged in urban school reform. First, scholars and programs identified and disseminated core characteristics of educators and institutions that have successfully served urban students of color Edmonds, Finally, some advocates demanded new approaches to schooling, such as district-run alternative schools with unique operational norms and innovative pedagogy.

Thus, today we have several general urban school reform modes that gestated initially in the s and s: In addition, reforms generally have been oriented toward two general entry points: The unit of analysis is an important factor, then, when considering school reform. Just as differences in the substance and points of entry of change efforts have helped define urban school reform, so have differences in determining what is meant by the word urban.

Prominent urban education researcher H. Also, it is fair to assert that urban school systems in the United States typically serve diverse populations that include significant numbers of students of color who live in poverty. I remain mindful that urban can evoke negative connotations—but such is not my intent. In my view, urban areas have been, are, and will be the lifeblood of the United States. They are the complex places where different people can and do meet, struggle, make democracy over again and again, and aspire. Moreover, I agree that too often, urban community pathologies are overemphasized and urban community strengths neglected Dixson et al.

Cities are perfect American imperfections, and the ongoing quest for urban school reform is part of that perfect imperfection. The idea that local context and certain other factors consistently matter joins the issue of outsider-led reform and the cyclical nature of change as three key concepts in urban school reform. While it is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive list of factors that facilitate or inhibit the progress of urban education reform, it is fair to assert that there are certain issues and elements that, across time and city spaces, have disproportionately affected the effort to improve schooling.

Some factors that consistently matter besides local context include race, ethnicity, and poverty; politics and power; and trust. By the s, race was the dividing line in city schooling: In the South, school systems in cities like Greensboro, North Carolina, became the settings for intensive desegregation efforts that attempted to overcome decades of separate schooling Chafe, In subsequent decades, disputes and negotiations around race became an indelible aspect of urban school district reform efforts Lipman, Meanwhile, in urban classrooms, teachers many or most of them White taught students from backgrounds different than their own.

Given this context, by the s, some African Americans in urban areas outside the South advocated for holding city teachers directly accountable for student standardized test scores as a means to counteract the negative expectations and outright racism that faculty may have directed toward African American children Spencer, In more recent decades, scholars and advocates have identified ways that teachers might better reach and teach students of color though approaches that acknowledge, honor, and engage student cultural backgrounds Billings, ; Delpit, ; Gay, ; Howard, ; Milner, As a general point, it remains a shameful American fact that after the widespread failure of desegregation to take hold as a mandated reform, the White majority has failed to enable sustained school improvement for multiple generations of urban African Americans.

To paraphrase Cornel West , race has mattered and does matter in urban school reform. Ethnicity has also proved to be an important factor in education in cities. As urban schools consolidated and grew into large bureaucracies from the late s into the s, immigrants entered cities in vast numbers. These previous efforts extended into the latter part of the century.

In the s, for instance, Mexican Americans in Houston, Texas, fought for recognition as a minority group. Presently, the issue of how to reform schools and engage communities in order to better educate Latino immigrant children has become a persistent concern in cities Lowenhaupt, ; Noguera, Poverty is a third factor that consistently matters in urban education. In cities like Newark, New Jersey, increasingly negative economic conditions coincided with school system decline Anyon, More recently, some popular professional development programs have decoupled poverty and race in ways that concern advocates who consider these factors as deeply intertwined Delpit, While race, ethnicity, and poverty have consistently mattered in urban school reform, it is important to note that there is fluidity in how each of the concepts are defined and how they interrelate.

For instance, Asian Americans represent significant populations in major cities, especially in the West, yet they are often neglected in the national public discourse, which tends to focus less on an emerging notion of the United States as a multicultural nation and more on the enduring notion of it as two nations—one African American and one White Takaki, For instance, through the 19th century and well into the 20th century, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, and Jewish Americans were considered distinct ethnic groups, but by the latter part of the 20th century, they were considered White Roediger, Significant disputes have emerged over the proper structural, systemic, and curricular alterations necessary to improve urban schools.

Hence, the phenomenon of urban school reform has repeatedly encountered a central question of urban politics and power: Their actions included teacher dismissals, leading the predominantly White, Jewish teachers to embark upon a citywide strike through their union Perlstein, In turn, Mayor Bloomberg invested his hand-chosen educational chief, Chancellor Joel Klein, with significant executive authority Lewis, ; Ravitch, In essence, there must be mutual, sustaining relational faith between those leading reform and those experiencing reform or, less charitably, those who are being reformed.

Hence, it is crucial that teachers, for instance, believe that legislators mandating standards-based reforms have their interests and the interests of their students in mind. Trust is an elusive and often endangered element in urban education, and it is further complicated by a second key concept in city school reform: Compounding the problematic nature of trust is the fact that policymakers and policy influencers with access to the financial and political power necessary to leverage significant change have developed and implemented urban education reforms—from district reorganizations to charter school start-ups to alternative teacher training initiatives—that have routinely engendered unanticipated local effects and fierce community resistance.

Cultural, racial, and socioeconomic differences among reform advocates, school personnel, and community members have often produced a perception gap: Delocalized reformers assert only good intentions, while established locals discern only questionable motives. Under this dynamic, dispiriting accounts of urban school failure accompany calls for reform, while dispiriting accounts of urban school reform failure accompany calls for more reforms Tyack, Through initiatives such as teacher accountability systems, elected policymakers offer symbolic evidence of their efforts to improve the life chances of urban children through strong legislative action Lipman, If a specific program proves successful in a small number of schools, expansion of that program brings risks.

Or successful programs can just fade away, succumbing to the demoralized, irrational nature of the status quo in urban education. Yet a lasting sociopolitical imperative to provide at least some symbolic evidence of efforts to improve urban schools virtually ensures that a new reform will soon be on its way Payne, In this way, urban school failure and urban school reform always go together.

While several concepts—certain factors consistently matter, the outsider issue, and the cyclical nature of reform—have routinely influenced urban education change efforts, several reform tensions have remained unresolved in city school improvement campaigns. These lasting dilemmas often emerged after common desires to improve urban schools progressed to polarized means of reform action. Next, I examine five enduring urban school reform tensions that have emanated around problems and solutions, schools and community, top-down and grassroots efforts, social justice and financial returns, and small-scale and large-scale.

In what has become an enduring tension in urban education reform, ideas and initiatives that some frame as solutions to urban school difficulties, others frame as problems that may exacerbate conditions. Stated in shorthand, solutions are problems and problems are solutions. Two phenomena that help illustrate this dynamic are accountability and charter schools.

With accountability, schools and educators are professionally and publically judged in terms of their ability to help students meet established academic standards, a measurement usually established through student performance on yearly, state-sanctioned, standardized tests Mehta, State-funded, independently operated charter schools are intended to increase educational options for children and families Berends, In terms of accountability, the idea that urban schools and educators must be held responsible for student performance is a long-standing one.

In , for example, a superintendent in Portland, Oregon, introduced a uniform curriculum and tested all students to see if they had mastered its material. For good measure, he published the results in the newspaper for full public view Tyack, Although this early case lasted only a few years, nearly a century later, test-based accountability began to gain more traction as states such as Michigan generated statewide assessments to gauge student performance Mehta, By the late s, the reigning definition of a good public school was a school whose students performed well on state-delivered standardized tests Chenoweth, On the one hand, a case can be made for accountability as a positive development for urban schools.

Others emphasized the notion of shared accountability between a community and its schools as the only way forward in urban education Spencer, Pursuing a different route forward, the Effective Schools movement identified a specific core of practices that helped urban students of color succeed academically Edmonds, By the s, a rich tradition of scholarship replicated the Effective Schools idea by demonstrating those specific conditions and approaches that led to academic improvement in urban schools Bryk et al.

Well-supported, teacher-driven professional learning communities examined formative student assessment data in ways that generated substantive student and school improvement Delpit, In these ways, accountability as it manifested over the last few decades provided core attention to academic performance in urban schooling, ensured that personnel in the schools bore responsibility for the performance of their schools and students, and demonstrated replicable approaches designed to encourage greater student achievement.

The best we can do is be cautious in our interpretations and look at other measures where possible, particularly graduation rates and postsecondary activities. In high-stakes turnaround schools, teachers with unsupportive principals can feel pressure to focus narrowly on test score improvement to the detriment of other educational goals. Given the lack of compelling evidence that high-stakes testing has succeeded in improving urban student outcomes at scale, Vasquez Heilig et al. Just as accountability has constituted both a solution and a problem in urban school reform, so have charter schools.

By the late s, Dr. Clark, an African American psychologist and public intellectual, articulated a vision for an alternative to the existing public school system. At the same time, he called for alternative public school systems to provide improved educational opportunities for African American students and other marginalized youth.

For Clark and others like him, expanding the educational options available to urban families was an important solution to larger issues, including poor schooling, poverty, and political disempowerment. By the s, beliefs in encouraging more competition and choice had propelled the development of charter schools, publicly funded but independently controlled institutions that by the s were situated mostly in urban areas and served students who were primarily African American and Latino Berends, ; Chapman, Programs like the Knowledge Is Power Program KIPP , a charter school started in the s in Houston, Texas, by two White Ivy League graduates who were also Teach For America alumni, gained significant exposure and praise from some quarters as a viable means to improving urban education as the organization opened schools nationwide Mathews, Advocates touted charter schools as innovative and tailored to the particular needs of urban students.

Extensive waiting lists at individual charter schools offered symbolic evidence that parents remain enamored with the concept, while federal policy during the administration of President Obama provided strong financial backing for charter school expansion Berends, ; Chapman, Despite such apparently strong support, charter schools have also raised substantial concerns. Charter school academic performance as measured through state-mandated testing, for instance, has been mixed. While some studies have demonstrated that urban charter schools show positive effects on academic performance, little is known about what particular organizational features led to those results Chapman, Another issue is that certain charter schools have failed to offer proper services for children who needed special education Delpit, In addition, the fact that programs like KIPP required parents to sign a behavior contract for their children and provide required hours of volunteer service may have led to selection bias in the types of parents attracted to the schools Chapman, Private interests, such as foundations that support charter schools, provide start-up institutions with funding to help give them the best possible chance to outperform traditional public schools, which may in turn promote the further privatization of public schooling Lipman, Just as with accountability, then, charter schools have engendered open admiration and fierce criticism.

In the end, we are left with this enduring tension in urban school reform: Solutions are problems and problems are solutions. A second enduring tension in urban education is as follows: Through the s, urban schools helped the assimilation of ethnic immigrants and provided means for individual and group social mobility Noguera, ; Tyack, By the s and s, new, racially diverse populations arrived in cities to find depleted socioeconomic conditions. Yet, faith that schools could help youth overcome the effects of poverty remained. The record is clear that urban schools can and do make a difference for urban youth of color.

Others have contended, however, that drastic socioeconomic conditions in an urban community limit the potential for significant educational improvement in schools. For instance, as did many American cities, Newark, New Jersey, rose as a major industrial center before World War II and thereafter experienced a steep decline in economic fortunes through the s. The school system itself traversed an analogous, connected pattern of rise and decline, suggesting that only an alleviation of deleterious economic factors could lead to alleviation of school ills Anyon, Others, however, have discussed how urban school improvement initiatives coincide with economic development efforts and housing policies that do not operate in the best interests of current residents.

In neighborhoods in Chicago, for instance, reforms like public school closings and replacement by charter schools have encouraged gentrification of neighborhoods by middle-class White parents. Importantly, educators have navigated the tension between urban school improvement and urban community socioeconomic conditions by establishing authentic connections with students and their parents. In the late s, Geoffrey Canada gained national attention when he established a multiservice charter school in Harlem that provided extended community-based services for local community members, from infants through parents Tough, She overcame initial skepticism to earn abiding trust Payne, Illustrative of how the goal of school-community connections remains resonant, scholarship has provided guidance regarding how educators can engage parents and engender community-based accountability Vasquez Heilig et al.

Some urban educators attempt to address this tension in their work on a daily basis through authentic community engagement. Another tension in urban school reform resonates in locating the proper fulcrum of change: Can a school district be transformed from new leaders at the top, or must change occur from community constituents agitating from inside and outside local schools?

In summary, urban school reform orients both as top-down and as grassroots efforts. The notion of generating improvement through tight control at the top reemerged in the s and into the s. Educational leadership and reform experts Larry Cuban and Michael Usdan explained:. Business, political, and educational leaders. This dynamic has led some cities to hire superintendents without backgrounds as professional educators who engaged in combat with what they framed as entrenched educational interests.

In the late s, for instance, U. In New York City, former U. Echoing this perspective, some superintendents with a professional background in education approached their positions much as those superintendents without professional backgrounds in education did. In these ways, urban school reform has proceeded in a top-down fashion. At the same time, significant energies and efforts have been exerted toward grassroots reforms.

In the end, urban school reform orients as both top-down and grassroots efforts. A fourth enduring tension manifests itself in the ideas that urban school reforms promise social justice for marginalized youth, but they end up delivering financial returns for educational vendors.

In the former sense, the quest to improve urban schools is, at its essence, a moral one.

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In calling for reform action and school improvement, individuals have highlighted the socioeconomic and racial injustices in the urban educational status quo. Two decades later, Noguera explained,. We should be able to serve these children because we are a great nation, a nation with extraordinary talents, skills, and resources. As these statements suggest, an underlying desire for basic social justice for children of color has consistently fueled the quest for urban school reform and improvement. At the same time that social justice has remained a fundamental animating goal in urban school reform, initiatives to improve urban education have also generated substantial money making opportunities.

Tension continues, then, as urban school reforms promise social justice for marginalized youth but they also deliver financial returns to educational vendors. A final tension resonates in the idea that small-scale reforms have demonstrated success, but policymakers and external funders still prize large-scale reforms. In recent decades, foundations have helped drive this quest for scalability as they seek returns on their significant investments.

In Chicago, for instance, when funders asked Dr. James Comer to begin his school development program in sixteen schools, he suggested that two schools would be more appropriate. Such pressure to act big with reforms has persisted, as is apparent in efforts at systemic reforms that have sought broad solutions to city problems that run across different socioeconomic and political domains Stone et al. The progress of turnaround, a school reform approach that gained national prominence in urban education in the late s, provides insight into the tension between small- and large-scale reform.

Originating in the business sector, turnaround referred to rapid school improvement achieved through dramatic interventions such as staff reconstitution Duke, After NCLB was signed into law in , the search for and promotion of schools that demonstrated quick academic growth intensified.

Major policy action soon followed. In , the U. Although turnaround—as reform idea and enacted policy—appeared to provide a clear, generic, and scalable prescription for the improvement of failing schools, it proved problematic upon implementation in urban areas. Also, a central element of many turnaround efforts, staff reconstitution, had proven ineffective when implemented as an improvement strategy in the s in cities such as Chicago and San Francisco Trujillo, At the same time, empirical studies demonstrated minimal evidence that turnaround strategies have led to demonstrable school improvement Aladjem et al.

They expose teachers to new responsibilities and give them a chance to use their skills to help peers succeed. One teacher leader in a large urban district drew a clear line: Even if teacher leaders did have more authority, these roles too often leave them searching for time in an already crammed schedule to work closely with those on their teams. Fully two-thirds of the teacher leaders in our research indicated that they are not given the time or resources to lead their teams effectively and they rarely receive extra compensation for their added responsibilities see Figure Therefore I feel as if I have no real authority.

Seeing these roles in action helps explain why they are not more effective. The goal was to create more leadership capacity within the schools. Teacher leaders in the district viewed the move positively. It added to their sense of value and enhanced communication within the building.


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Most reported that they have neither the authority nor the time to visit classrooms, provide real-time coaching, evaluate performance or suggest changes to their colleagues. Teachers do share ideas in department or class-level meetings, but there is no mechanism to work more closely with other teachers inside the classroom. Many school systems have turned to professional learning communities as a means to provide a more structured form of deliberation and collaboration.

Transforming Schools: How Distributed Leadership Can Create More High-Performing Schools

At their best, PLCs can be highly rigorous and well run, creating a valuable forum for discussing core instructional issues and providing teachers much-needed support and counsel. Typically, they are also designed around teams doing work together, which can help promote peer-to-peer learning.

As valuable as PLCs might be in fostering collaboration, they usually fall short of plugging the leadership gap. They rely on meetings and group discussion rather than empowering the PLC leader to work closely with team members through observation, coaching and feedback. One urban district we worked with had invested heavily in PLCs.

The superintendent reflected that the PLC leaders were skilled at facilitating meetings and communication. Now he thinks that may leave room for improvement. By definition, instructional coaches play a significantly different role than either teacher leaders or PLC leads. Teachers report that these one-on-one relationships can be very helpful in terms of skill development and growth. And unlike teacher leaders and PLC leads, instructional coaches do assume many of the instructional development responsibilities that typically fall to principals—from observation and feedback to facilitating professional development sessions see Figure But like teacher leaders, instructional coaches are not plugging the leadership gap at most schools.

While our research shows they have more time than a typical teacher leader, they lack the mandate and the authority to truly lead.

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Why such a gap between what their role appears to be on paper and the responsibility they feel for outcomes? My coaching has no teeth. Systems set up instructional coaching roles this way because of a widespread view, unique to education, that responsibility for coaching and evaluation should be separate. Officials at one midsize CMO said that when they first set up an instructional coaching program, teachers asked for a clear line between those who were evaluating principals and APs and those who were coaching instructional coaches.

Teachers loved the customized, one-on-one nature of the program but it eventually led to confusion and became distracting as instructional coaches and principals gave teachers conflicting messages. This is happening in systems all over the country. It represents a missed opportunity to realize the full benefit of the time and effort schools are investing in coaching and evaluation. The messages teachers receive from the multiple individuals involved are often out of sync, evaluation is seen as disconnected and unsupportive, and coaching loses its relevance and power.

School systems have increasingly recognized that asking principals to assume direct responsibility for the development and support of approximately 40 teachers is not an effective approach. Teachers are left feeling isolated and unsupported and, over time, have less and less faith in their ability to achieve far better outcomes with their students. School systems have been investing to close this gap but all too often those investments have stopped short of creating effective leadership capacity.

Additional leadership roles are weakly structured and focused too far from the core activities of teaching and learning inside the classroom. Rarely are these roles designed to fit into an integrated model of how the school will be led. The good news is that a number of the systems we have studied are breaking new ground in their efforts to build more effective school leadership models and their results so far are encouraging.


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    • The key question is this: How can school systems design and implement distributed leadership models that empower leaders with the time and authority to help schools deliver on their most important objectives: Such leadership models are rare today. Teacher support is too often fragmented: Some leaders just provide coaching, some focus only on evaluation, some work on professional development and others facilitate collaboration.

    Our research has focused on which factors the most promising models have in common. That, coupled with our own extensive experience helping organizations in many other sectors design better leadership models, led to five key principles we believe are critical to designing and implementing the kind of robust distributed leadership model that can help transform a typical school into an extraordinary one see Figure Teachers working in schools with distributed leadership do, however, feel more positive.

    The Net Promoter Score of teachers in pilot schools is 47 points higher than for all teachers we surveyed and significantly higher than for teachers in other Denver schools. At the Sanger Unified School District in California, which has the longest established distributed leadership model of all the systems we studied, the teacher Net Promoter Score was an impressive These differences in teacher advocacy are dramatic and bode well for improvements in teaching and learning.

    Make a bet on a leadership model. An effective distributed leadership model is a comprehensive blueprint for how a school will resource and deploy leadership to deliver on its core mission—improving the quality of teaching and learning. A great design answers three sets of critical questions including:. Designing such a model is a major undertaking. It requires deciding on a high-level approach or multiple approaches to test, and then building and refining the supporting systems—all of which takes significant time and effort see Figure Many systems have taken a pass on deciding which leadership model would be best for their schools.

    They see every school as unique, with its own context and leadership requirements. Others believe the system should identify and share a best practice school leadership model but are daunted by the task and struggling with how to begin. Some room for local customization is important, but the intent should be to design a model that the entire system can bet on.

    The school leadership model is no different—it is a tool that is best designed, with plenty of principal and teacher input, to serve the system as a whole with latitude for school-level customization. One of the clearest reasons a common approach makes sense is that it is simply impractical to ask principals to design and put in place a robust leadership model on their own.

    As we discussed in Chapter 2, we ask for extraordinary effort from our principals and they usually have little time—or the relevant experience—to both design and implement a new leadership model in their schools. Distributing leadership for the first time is an enormous change and, like all big changes, it requires significant time and energy, even when putting in place a proven and well-defined model. Asking our principals to initiate that change and design the model on their own effectively guarantees they will stick with the status quo.

    A common design also takes advantage of the fact that systems are much better positioned to look across all their schools to see what is working and what needs adjustment. As each school implements the model, the central office can codify best practices and share what it learns across the system. Sanger in California, for instance, set out a decade ago to change the leadership model in every one of its schools. It chose an approach designed to cultivate multiple leaders in each building who feel truly responsible for developing the teachers they manage and improving the outcomes of their students.

    Sanger leadership agreed on a common model that centers on Team Leads—teacher leaders who work with teams of teachers in PLCs. But they left the details of how to roll it out to the schools. While every school has its differences, they all share the fundamental mission of improving teaching and learning. Groups of elementary, middle and high schools in a given system are more alike than unalike when it comes to addressing this core challenge. Standardizing as much as possible around a well-developed model makes deploying and managing it easier and more effective. If schools have similar roles and leadership processes, the system can better align critical support functions such as talent development, compensation and evaluation.

    Denver Public Schools learned the value of betting on a common distributed leadership model when it set out to boost the leadership capacity in its schools six years ago. There were pockets of excellence, but it was difficult to know what was working and why. It centered the model on a set of clearly defined teacher leadership roles with processes specifically designed to support and strengthen them—including precise definitions of responsibility, a standard set of expectations and common compensation structures.

    Individual schools could tailor the model around things like the amount of release time teacher leaders received and the composition of teacher teams.

    Urban School Reform in the United States - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education

    Denver started by piloting its model in just 14 of its schools. After the initial pilot, the district made modifications e. Each wave has helped the district fine-tune the model further see Figure Denver Superintendent Tom Boasberg underscored how important getting behind a common approach has been: Absent a clear vision, a set of vitally needed professional-learning supports for teacher leaders and principals, and peer-to-peer reinforcements among schools, all of the forces that are against change would defeat the possibility of significant progress in all but the most resolute of schools.

    Create and strengthen leadership capacity. Some focus on increasing the number of APs in each school; others are betting on teacher leaders. The common thread in the models that are showing the most promise is strengthening the amount and quality of leadership capacity focused on the core mission of teaching and learning within each school building. The central question is where to allocate scarce resources.

    The systems that decide to add more APs, for instance, are usually fast-growing charter management organizations that need robust talent pipelines to produce more principals for an increasing number of schools. Green Dot enrollment has grown more than 10 times since By adding more APs and training them to be instructional leaders capable of mentoring and developing better teachers, the system has both strengthened the leadership capacity in its current schools and created a rich talent pool to draw on when it opens new schools.

    A typical Green Dot school with to students now has one principal and two APs. That means none of the three top leaders has more than 13 teachers on his or her team. Green Dot ensures that the APs are well trained through a rigorous program of mentoring and professional development. The idea is to focus them on developing the instructional effectiveness of their teams while preparing them to one day lead schools of their own see Figure Other districts have chosen to boost leadership capacity by more fully empowering teacher leaders.

    The Team Lead is on point to observe and coach team members, provide input into their evaluations and share responsibility for their performance. Denver chose to focus on teacher leaders because it believed that current teachers would have the most credibility among their peers and would bring to the process the most relevant and up-to-date content expertise.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, there is also a critical learning curve for principals when it comes to building more leadership capacity. One key to distributing leadership within a school building is that the principal has to get comfortable sharing responsibility with others. That requires becoming a leader of leaders rather than a leader of all—not always an easy shift.

    Some had to learn to pull back and get out of the way. Their job in the new model was to coach and develop their Team Leads to handle those problems, not jump in themselves. In her first year as principal, she was responsible for observing each of her 26 teachers nine times a year and providing all of their evaluations. This left little time for her to provide deeper mentoring and coaching to teachers.

    Sunshine Peak now has two APs who coach eight teachers each, typically within departments of the coach's expertise. To keep this number low for APs and also allow interested and experienced teachers to practice instructional coaching skills, Yates also created a roster of teacher leaders who are each responsible for coaching and evaluating one or two teachers. For Yates, the shift in focus and duties has been dramatic.

    She now spends most of her time coaching the coaches and helping them develop as instructional leaders. It raises the bar for performance across the whole school. Focus leaders on improving teaching and learning. They are supporting teachers by observing and, at times, co-teaching in classrooms. They provide richer and more actionable feedback on instruction. You have to get your hands dirty. An effective distributed leadership model starts with an understanding that teaching is an incredibly difficult job—not just technically, but also emotionally.

    The challenges implicit in these numbers are often amplified in urban districts. Students bring their academic and broader life challenges to the classroom every day and teachers are on the front lines supporting them. Even in districts where conditions are less dire, the pressure to produce better results can be intense. The message is always the same: Student outcomes are not where they should be and teachers need to raise their game. If teachers are to improve against this backdrop, they need stronger support and better coaching from leaders who are invested in their success.

    Districts like Denver are finding that the most effective coaching and mentorship involves not only one-to-one observation and feedback, but also time spent working together and collaborating to solve everyday problems. I think about the big picture and what needs to change and then I think about small actions that will help us move forward and we focus together on those. I work with those teachers to make their objectives clear to kids and then we work together to plan their lessons to ensure they line up against those objectives.

    The power of relationships between leaders and teachers is the reason Green Dot has shifted its leadership emphasis from evaluation toward the broader challenge of supporting and developing teachers.

    Before the switch, Green Dot graded teachers on a scale of 1 to 4 using a standardized evaluation form with 29 indicators in five areas of teaching. Instead of supporting teachers and helping them solve problems, leaders spent a great deal of time sorting through the complex rubric and assigning scores.

    Teachers almost always received the same score 3 to 4 and they saw little in the way of valuable feedback or assistance. The conversation was about the score, not improving performance. Green Dot is moving toward a system that prioritizes supporting and helping teachers grow over pure evaluation. It is steering leaders toward using the existing rubric to guide conversations about what teachers should be concentrating on and encouraging them to spend much more time interacting with the teachers they are responsible for leading.

    The power of distributed leadership is that it sets our leaders up to provide the kind of hands-on, day-to-day coaching and support—real feedback, not a checklist—that will help teachers develop their skills and do what they came to do: Many teachers invest heavily in their students, reveling in their successes and sharing the burden of their failures.

    But maintaining enthusiasm and energy for the job is a daily challenge. Too often, teachers see the limited guidance they get as punitive—a one-way, arms-length demand for better performance. The most effective school leaders understand this and see their roles as helping to create energy for teaching by ensuring teachers get the support they need. The most effective school leadership models position our leaders to do just that and ensure there are enough of them so every teacher gets the support he or she deserves.

    Create teams with a shared mission. An essential part of strong leadership at the front line is building great teams and creating situations where team members can share knowledge, dissect problems together and work toward common goals. The typical school setup tends to encourage isolation more than team building and peer-to-peer learning.

    Urban School Reform in the United States

    Sharing of ideas between grade levels or subject matter groups is typically serendipitous, not intentional. Most of the time, teachers are on their own—they report having only four hours a month to collaborate with other teachers. An effective distributed leadership model breaks down those barriers by creating opportunities for teachers to work together—and an expectation that they will. Someone is always in your classroom. The most successful distributed leadership models match leaders to teams of teachers who serve a common purpose.

    Denver groups elementary school teachers together by grade level. It creates subject matter teams at the middle and high school levels see Figure Non-core subject area teachers are generally grouped together and, given a high enough concentration, special education teachers also form a team.

    What matters is that a team makes sense and is designed to foster peer-to-peer collaboration and a joint commitment to student outcomes. Denver has designed its teams carefully to enable teacher leaders to personally mentor other teachers and lead by example. The model also helps leaders create opportunities for the team to do work together. That in turn helps build a culture of shared accountability such that team members feel responsible for the outcomes of all the kids taught by teachers on their team.

    The greater the commonality of interest among members, the more teachers learn from each other. In California, Sanger has been working on a PLC-based distributed leadership structure for over a decade and this kind of collaboration has become standard operating procedure. How you deliver is up to you, but you are part of a community. We talk about and take what are best teaching practices and use them. They keep us focused on the students and teachers have the freedom and support to succeed.

    Empower leaders with the time and authority to lead. Having more leaders in our schools with true end-to-end responsibility for the development of our teachers is a key part of addressing the current leadership gaps: But adding more leaders is only part of the answer. Systems must also set those leaders up for success with both the time and authority to effectively lead a team of teachers.

    As we saw in Principle 2, some school systems are having success with a distributed leadership model that invests heavily in APs. They have increased the number of APs in their buildings, focused them on instructional leadership and given them the time to deliver, which frees them from the operating issues that all too often consume their days.

    These systems have been careful to prioritize and articulate the instructional leadership role they expect APs to play. They explicitly direct them to be in classrooms frequently—observing, providing high-quality coaching and working alongside their teams. My priority was great leadership in schools. We want our APs and principals to have high-quality, development-focused relationships with the teachers in their buildings and, to do that, we simply need more of them. Green Dot has also called on teacher leaders to play many important roles in its schools, including observing other teachers and providing feedback.

    But it has chosen to invest more in AP capacity than teacher leader release time. Green Dot values teacher leadership but recognizes its limits absent the release time necessary to play a larger role. Other school systems we studied are, however, betting heavily on teacher leaders to increase their instructional leadership capacity and are investing in providing more release time. Pilot programs launched by Denver, the Project L.

    They started in and have added another school each year since. Efforts like these to define roles more intentionally and provide more time for working closely with teachers are an essential part of establishing an end-to-end distributed school leadership model.

    But it is also critical to empower new leaders with the authority they need to be successful. The idea of an empowered AP role is broadly understood and accepted in most schools.