Amid soaring rates of teacher burnout and attrition, those at City Year are finding a trend that may seem surprising: Participants in their Network for School Improvement, when asked how likely they would be to recommend the network to other colleagues, have given an average rating of 9 out of 10. The authors have found that six key principles can…

Collaborative efforts are key to transforming schools into communities of powerful learning where all students excel academically and develop the agency, integrated identity, and competencies necessary to have successful lives as adults. Such efforts start with leaders, learning to cultivate anti-racist systems, structures, policies, and…

Investing in high-quality, effective mentoring programs is a key, research-based strategy to increase teacher retention and new teachers' effectiveness. But not all mentoring programs are created equal. This article presents the following 3 strategies to upgrade mentoring programs for new teachers: (1) Focus mentoring on instructional improvement;…

This article summarizes lessons and examples from a learning community of leaders from 78 large and medium school districts across the U.S. that has been meeting monthly throughout the pandemic, that other educators might apply to their work as they continue to navigate difficult and ambiguous times. The learning community members have identified…

According to a recent research study, teachers attributed students' performance to their instruction only 15% of the time. Far more frequently, they connected results to student characteristics, particularly students' behavior, effort, or background. It's been long known that individual student characteristics, family background, and neighborhood…

The Leadership and Inquiry for Turnaround (LIFT) initiative in Utah supports turnaround leaders' development and builds resilience and capacity of school leadership teams to thrive and lead their schools to improvement, even in the face of major challenges and adversity. This article describes how professional learning can help mitigate the…

Many education stakeholders might grapple with some of these challenges in designing a new way to drive positive change in public education policy: (1) Implementing strategies that appear to hold promise but have never been scaled; (2) Maintaining the integrity of research-based interventions while addressing the need for contextual adaptation…

Good teaching does not come from mere check-box compliance. Teachers who have real impact with their students continually use their expertise and intuition to evaluate, adapt, and improve how they implement new strategies within their classrooms. New practices rarely make a difference unless teachers engage eagerly and thoughtfully in adopting and…

The educational landscape around standards, assessment, professional development, and funding is changing at a rapid pace. This article asks how can education institutions--and educators--respond with a balance of urgency and coherence? How can education institutions temper the need for risk-taking and innovation with the responsibility to deliver…

Meria Carstarphen, superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, has nearly 20 years of experience in educational leadership, primarily in urban school districts. Her previous roles included superintendent in Austin, Texas, from 2009 to 2014 and administrator in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the District of Columbia. She serves as a commissioner and…

In a learning system, central office personnel assume collective responsibility for schools and go about their work very differently. They are responsible not only for departments and programs, but also for student learning. They demonstrate that responsibility by engaging in data informed conversations about student achievement. Central office…

It is not clear exactly when school leaders first started wearing an "S" on their chests and began defiantly uttering the phrase, "I can do it all myself!" But after days, weeks, months, or even years of racing wildly from task to task, many a superhero principal has come to the stark realization that nothing could be further…