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Since 2002, Eugene School District 4J has collaborated with The Wallace Foundation, selected states, and districts within those states, to help the field understand and effectively respond to key unanswered challenges: defining the essential elements of leadership, greatly improving the training of principals and superintendents, and providing leaders with the policies, incentives and job conditions they need to raise student achievement on a wide scale.
Over the past six years, Oregon’s work with The Wallace Foundation has brought Leadership to the forefront as a state priority enabling the state to institutionalize new policies and practices that reflect this. As a result, the state has made considerable progress in putting in place essential elements of an aligned system of leader development. Now that this groundwork has been laid, Oregon is ready to take these features, policies and practice, and knit them together with the thread of standards to strategically and intentionally create an aligned system of leadership development. (See the Oregon Leadership Network for a list of other Oregon districts and partnerships involved.) The Leadership Initiative is designed to encourage and support that work with a three year grant, funded on an annual basis.
Program Summary and Goals of Initiative
Key expected accomplishments of the grant: an analysis of how the initiative knits together as a cohesive leadership system aimed at ensuring that school leaders are well-trained in the skills needed to improve instruction and manage change – and are well-supported by policies, job conditions and incentives.
Main strategies toward reaching the goals for 2007-08:
- Standards – States and districts are identifying and codifying standards of effective leadership for individuals, teams and programs. Such standards are based on research and feedback from districts and articulate competencies, skills and behaviors in such ways that outcomes can be observed and measured.
- Training and development – States and districts are establishing high-quality leader training programs based on the leadership standards (content) and characteristics of effective training programs (process). They assess program quality and outcomes, have evidence to support those assessments and are continuously improving the programs. All leadership training program accreditation requirements are well-connected to the standards.
- Policies and conditions – States and districts are improving the policies and the conditions necessary for leaders to lift student achievement, which are based on the leadership standards and could include: changing the criteria for leaders to obtain certification, having and using reliable data to allocate resources (people, time and money); ensuring that roles and responsibilities clearly focus on improving teaching and learning; ensuring that hiring and placement practices, leader evaluation procedures and incentives encourage leaders’ behaviors to reflect the standards; and enacting supportive policies.
- Scale and sustainability – The strategies and lessons learned are being or have potential to be used more broadly and there is tangible evidence of structures and policies that will outlast the Wallace funding.
Click here to download a PDF printable copy of the “Scope of Work: Developing an Aligned System of Leader Development,” which details the work of the grant for July 1, 2007 through June 30, 2008.
Click here to download a PDF printable copy of the “Eugene School District 4J Deliverables 2008-09 Work Plan,” which details the work of the grant for July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009.
