Chapter 8: Building Effective School System Leadership: Rethinking Preparation and Policy

It has grown increasingly clear that schools must become more successful with a progressively wider range of learners. Our nation’s citizens, leaders and businesses continue to look to the United States education system to provide students with the complex skills they need to participate in a knowledge-driven and technology-based society. Although reformers hold diverse perspectives concerning how schools should be supported or goaded to fulfill this responsibility, most now agree that leadership matters and that increasing the expertise and effectiveness of leaders is essential to the success of ongoing efforts to improve PreK-12 education.

The kind of leadership needed to ensure that all students are able to think critically, to solve complex problems and to master essential content areas is a great deal more demanding than that needed to ensure that most students matriculate with a set of routine skills. Moreover the kind of leadership needed to ensure that all teachers are knowledgeable, skillful and able to respond differentially and appropriately in supporting students’ success is much more challenging than that needed to ensure that a certified teacher is assigned to every class.