Quality leadership is a must in any important human pursuit, and education is no exception. While teachers have the most direct and obvious impact on student learning, the school leader is in the best position to ensure that excellent teaching and learning are not limited to single classrooms but spread throughout entire schools. Improving leadership holds particular promise as an effective way for states and districts to help better the fortunes of the nation's most underserved students. Those are the facts and convictions at the heart of a decade-long commitment by The Wallace Foundation to work with states and urban districts across the country to change the lives of education leaders so that they, in turn, are better able to lift the educational fortunes of every student in every school in America. In its decade of research on school leadership, The Wallace Foundation offers several lessons on what it takes to improve leadership. Those lessons can be grouped under four ideas: (1) The job of leading schools needs to change fundamentally; (2) Leadership training must change to correspond with this new definition of good leadership; (3) School leadership requires conditions that will allow leaders to drive better teaching and learning throughout their schools; and (4) States and districts need to collaborate closely to ensure that policies and practices at all levels of the school system are aligned with supporting principals as effective leaders of learning.