While traditional school principals remain key coordinators and facilitators of school improvement work, they must also invite a new body of school and community leaders to the forefront of building a collective vision for that work. Leadership is no longer about dragging people along: it is about orchestrating ideas, people, visions, potential, and organizations into a cohesive program of educational improvement. The most effective and inclusive educational leadership styles today combine bottom-up and top-down approaches. School and district leaders must share power and delegate key decision-making authority to representative teams of teachers, parents, business leaders, seniors, and others. The multiple interests and expectations that these stakeholder teams bring to the table are crucial to building a common vision for their community’s education system. A sustained and inclusive dialogue identifies priorities, points to strengths, and ensures that even the softest voice is heard. And when that dialogue turns into action, communities begin to institutionalize an engagement process that can be leveraged for a wide range of future projects. The key to sustaining such efforts often lies in the leadership capacity of these key stakeholder coalitions. Currently, in communities across the country, several prominent groups are working to create alliances between key stakeholder groups, advocate for a shared and collaborative reform process, and build the leadership capacity of their own members/constituencies.

Five groups that are building leadership for reform

Parents, businesses, and community groups, as well as school system personnel, are leading a variety of efforts across the country to initiate and support school improvement. To illustrate emerging sources of leadership, we highlight some of the efforts we have encountered in the course of our work.

1. Administrators. By creating school councils and site improvement teams, administrators in many communities are developing new relationships with teachers, staff, parents, and community members. These relationships are based on listening, sharing information, building partnerships, and finding common ground. Trust is an important ingredient in the success of these new collaborations, as school doors are opened and “outsiders” are invited into principals’ offices, classrooms and assembly halls to engage in meaningful action. for school improvement. In fact, administrators are drawing on the energy, spirit, and expertise of parents and community members to champion and advocate for local standards, review and establish budgets, and build support for public schools in their communities. New projects in recent years have enabled some schools to foster a close relationship with parents and community members by collectively examining the future implications of the district’s human, financial, and structural resources.

2. Family members. There is compelling evidence that when parents become active and involved in their children’s education, those students achieve at higher levels. To that end, key coalitions of educators, business and civic leaders, and parents in many states are actively seeking to identify motivated parents to equip them with the skills and information they need to become leaders in school reform efforts in their own communities. In addition to receiving information about the state’s education reform law and its high-stakes testing system, parents learn how to communicate with other parents and develop skills to increase their voice in decisions about their children’s education. These parent leaders design a sustainable project in their home communities to engage other parents and families in an effort that will impact student achievement. Parents recently conducted surveys on how schools communicate with families, created handbooks to provide students and families with key information about the transition to high school, and led workshops where parents and teachers talk with each other.

3. Efforts of the whole community. Gone are the days when volunteers were only asked to bake cookies or raise funds for their schools. Today, community volunteers are serving on school boards and making critical budget and program decisions, reviewing curriculum issues and promoting standards, and building support for bond referendums and other key projects. In fact, more and more communities are fostering key advocates for public education by giving citizens the training, information, and skills needed to make a difference in the work of their schools. By reaching out to schools, businesses, and the media in member districts, the coalition has been working hard to build realistic and appropriate expectations and understanding for the new standards and tests among educators, parents, and business and civic leaders. More citizen volunteers were recruited, trained, and assigned to each of the city’s middle schools to document the behavior, activities, and interaction of students, teachers, and principals through classroom observation. As this process continues, the coalition will mount an ambitious engagement strategy to disseminate its findings and mobilize the entire community around middle school reform.

4. Business investment. Traditional models of business investment in schools have included school adoption programs, mentoring and internship programs, speaker bureaus, and computer donations. While valuable, these programs often fail to foster a sustained multidimensional relationship between business and schools. A key component of this unique collaboration model are “loan executives,” business leaders on loan from their companies to work with participating schools and districts to implement change, streamline processes and incorporate technology into their daily operations. With the addition of new reading curricula, students have shown remarkable increases in their reading scores.

5. Policy Makers. As new state and federal laws are enacted, new regulations are implemented, and research on a wide variety of educational practices becomes available, it is important that this collective information reaches the hands of educational policymakers, public officials, and public officials. media. Efforts across the country are beginning to ensure that school board members, legislators, policy analysts and appointed officials receive a prompt and comprehensive review of information on key school reform developments, including laws and regulations, standards, and accountability measures, and an understanding of who the key local, state, and national stakeholders are.