District Leader

New York rural schools and districts have a high percentage of core teaching assignments filled by highly qualified teachers; there are only small differences across key factors such as poverty and the need for school improvement. Urban schools—particularly those in New York City—have fewer core assignments filled by highly qualified teachers.

This report from The Education Trust recommends policy changes that districts and states can consider to address issues of school culture, and how these issues relate to rates of teacher dissatisfaction and turnover in schools that serve students from low-income and minority families.

Ensuring safer schools requires establishing effective indicators of the current state of school crime and safety across the United States and regularly updating and monitoring these indicators. This report presents the most recent data available on school crime and student safety, including topics such as victimization, teacher injury, bullying, school conditions, fights, weapons, the availability and student use of drugs and alcohol, and student perceptions of personal safety at school. Indicators of crime and safety are compared across different population subgroups and long term.

This presentation from Ellen Behrstock-Sherratt overviews the literature related to the role of school leaders in addressing equity issues. 

The authors of this report reviewed four districts that exhibited shared leadership. The report defines the different components of shared leadership and the conditions that enable it, and it also provides some examples of shared leadership. The authors believe there is no one right way to distribute leadership; both bottom-up and top-down approaches can be successful.

Mead Valley School is one of the poorest schools in the United States. In almost every conceivable way, its students are very much underprivileged. Yet the school managed to beat the odds and sustain high levels of academic achievement. School leaders turned Mead Valley School around by using five main strategies:

This article describes how one new school principal in Kentucky transformed from a task-dominated agenda to one that allowed her to visit every classroom at least once per week. This approach allowed her to drastically increase the amount of time focused on instruction and learning. The key behind the transformation was a trained school administration manager.

The authors of this report, which focuses on 11 schools in North Carolina, discuss the importance of trust in schools. Going beyond the issues of what effect trust has on a school and why, they address how a school leader can foster a trusting school culture. Strategies for building trust are provided, along with practical examples in the words of those school leaders who succeeded in creating trusting school communities. 

This Public Impact webpage provides an overview table and detailed descriptions of school models that redesign jobs, and in some cases, use technology in new ways, to extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students.

This Public Impact webpage provides information on how school models that extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students can create new roles that enable teachers and paraprofessionals to pursue a variety of career paths.