Building a Lattice for School Leadership: Lessons from England. Policy Brief #15-1

The flat structure of American schools is ill-suited to meet today's increasing demands for educational improvement. Even with unprecedented pressure to raise performance, America's schools are still largely organized the way they were a century ago--with a single principal presiding over a largely egg-crated faculty. Is such a thin veneer of instructional leadership sufficient to build the capacity of teachers at each grade level and content area to develop students to reach high expectations? Historically, American schools have addressed this deficit in instructional support with a patchwork of poorly defined roles and responsibilities--under-utilized department chairs, fitful coaching models, and informal teacher leaders who generally lacked the training and authority to influence the practice of their peers. How exactly do these roles fit into contemporary schools' strategies for improving teaching and learning? How can we more systematically build the capacity of school leaders to engage with and overcome the challenges of continuous school improvement? One place to look for fresh ideas about leadership development is England. Over the past 15 years, educational leaders in England have made several important revisions in the ways leadership is organized in schools, how leaders are developed, and how leadership is integrated into the larger educational infrastructure. There is much that American policymakers might learn from these experiences. This policy brief examines the evolution of the educational leadership development system in England to see what ideas American leaders and policymakers might take from looking transnationally. The brief is based on a more in-depth examination of that leadership development system described in a Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) research report entitled "Building a Lattice for School Leadership: The Top-to-Bottom Rethinking of Leadership Development in England and What It Might Mean for American Education.Research Report #RR-83" (see ED558763). The research report was based upon a year of research on school leadership in England that included extensive background research, site visits to schools and leadership programs, and over 20 interviews with government officials, teachers and school leaders, university researchers, union officials, and both for profit and non-profit school leadership providers. Implications for policy makers are presented.