Strengthening school and district leadership in order to recruit, support and retain good teachers.

The Center has been working with a group of co-sponsors to develop plans for a comprehensive initiative to strengthen school site leadership throughout the state as a critical component to our ongoing effort to improve teaching quality. Our partners in this enterprise include SRI International, WestEd, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, and public and private universities. The current debate at the federal and state levels regarding how to improve the academic outcomes for students attending the nation’s highest need schools has amplified the call to focus all members of the education workforce – principals and teachers alike – on this important task. Based on this initial work, we are now poised to bring our experience in supporting and sustaining high quality teaching to bear on sharpening school site leadership’s role in strengthening teaching practice.

This initiative will begin with the third in the Center’s successful education policy forum series that will be devoted to the critical role K-12 site leaders play in transforming California’s schools in ways that ensure that all students are well prepared to meet the challenges of post-secondary education and careers. The forum participants will include outstanding teachers, administrators and policy experts from across the state and around the nation. The series will draw on current research and work to achieve a professional consensus regarding the ways that school site leaders can and should impact teaching quality. The group will identify policy priorities and develop recommendations to move California’s education reform agenda forward. The findings, conclusions, and recommendations that emerge from the forum will be included in a policy brief disseminated by the Center. Further, this work will be used in the development of the 2011 research design for Teaching and California’s Future and become the foundation of our 2011 report on the status of teaching in California.

Key to success in reaching our long-term goals for this initiative will be in applying information derived from the forum to the ways in which administrator development and support at both the state and local levels can be improved. Currently, mirroring the teacher development continuum, administrator development is siloed and fails to stitch together the training, support and professional development administrators receive into a cohesive, coherent process that spans a career.

Over the next few years, increasing pressure will be brought to bear on the principalship, with greater attention paid to the ways in which leaders are prepared and supported to work more effectively with members of their staff to strengthen teaching practice. We believe that the time is right to engage education leaders, policy makers and others in the serious task of linking leadership support to teaching outcomes.