Kentucky Department of Education

Since 2000, The Wallace Foundation has supported a range of efforts aimed at significantly improving student learning by strengthening the standards, the training and the performance of education leaders along with the conditions and incentives that affect their success – long a neglected area of school reform. Kentucky’s Wallace Foundation grant is focused on the challenges of a working hypothesis which the Wallace Foundation calls a “cohesive leadership system.” This concept, holds considerable potential for helping speed and make more permanent the advances being made in developing lead­ership that benefits the learning of all students, using a more system-wide, co­ordinated approach to state-, district- and school-level policies and practices.

A cohesive leadership sys­temic approach to enhancing leader­ship, while complicated and challeng­ing, offers a pathway for moving the collective thinking among state and district policymakers away from isolated or uncoordinated efforts on single elements of leadership improve­ment. The pillars of a cohesive sys­tem, if successfully implemented and sustained, can result in states and districts working more collaboratively so that:

• State and district leadership stan­dards are well-aligned and based on a widely-accepted definition of what successful leadership is and how leaders actually need to be­have in order to achieve it;

• Leadership training is closely tied to standards and highly-responsive to the job conditions, needs and learning goals of districts;

• Continuing professional develop­ment opportunities for leaders are linked to learning goals and there are many opportunities for princi­pals to share challenges, successes and effective practices;

• Leadership is shared and distrib­uted rather than resting with single leaders;

• Decision-making is fact-based, appropriate data related to learn­ing goals are gathered by states and districts, and leaders are well-trained in their use;

• Leaders have the necessary author­ity to allocate the people, time and money to meet student learning needs; and

• Incentives are geared to focus lead­ers’ performance on successful practice and encourage high-qual­ity principals to work in districts and schools that most need them.

To summarize, a cohesive leadership system can result in many more dis­tricts developing a sufficient pipeline of well-prepared future leaders, rather than relying on a search for super­heroes. It could mean better-coordi­nated state and district policies that provide the conditions and incentives for leaders to succeed, rather than the status quo in which leaders must try, usually in vain, to beat an unsup­portive system. In a more cohesive system, successes in improving teach­ing and learning could more readily spread to entire schools, districts and states through careful documentation, rather than remaining hidden, isolat­ed and unproven in single classrooms. And because they are fact-based and widely-shared, effective ideas about teaching and learning would be like­lier to survive transitions in school or district leadership.

COHESION: A MEANS, NOT THE END

A more cohesive sys­tem of state, district and school-level policies and practices affect­ing school leadership is a means, not the ultimate goal. When The Wallace Foundation decided six years ago to work with partner states, districts and researchers to test and share new ideas and prac­tices to improve education leadership, it was out of a conviction that this work might unleash a powerful, largely underutilized force to help our nation’s schools realize an elu­sive objective: success for all children, especially those who have been con­tinually left behind. The Wallace Foundation is con­vinced that a more cohesive system of leadership policies and practices has the potential to speed progress toward that goal, and they are com­mitted to working with the field to deepen our collective understand­ing of such a system. In the end, however, it is the success of children as learners and eventual productive citizens that will determine whether developing a more cohesive system of school leadership is worth the con­siderable effort it will undoubtedly demand of all of us.

The Kentucky Cohesive Leadership System (KyCLS) includes three major components:  Instructional Leadership Team and Teacher Leadership Development; Principal Program Preparation, and the School Administration Manager (SAM) Project.

See full report on Leadership for Learning: Making the Connections Among State, District AND School Policies AND Practices, Wallace CLS Perspective.