Lately, our nation's strategy for improving our schools is mostly limited to "getting tough" with teachers. Blaming teachers for poor outcomes, we spend almost all of our energy trying to control teachers' behavior and school operations. But what if all of this is exactly the opposite of what is needed? What if teachers are the answer and not the problem? What if trusting teachers, and not controlling them, is the key to school success? Examining the experiences of teachers who are already trusted to call the shots, this book answers: What would teachers do if they had the autonomy not just to make classroom decisions, but to collectively--with their colleagues--make the decisions influencing whole school success? Decisions such as school curriculum, how to allocate the school budget, and whom to hire. Teachers with decision-making authority create the schools that many of us profess to want. They individualize learning. Their students are active (not passive) learners who gain academic and life skills. The teachers create school cultures that are the same as those in high-performing organizations. They accept accountability and innovate, and make efficient use of resources. These promising results suggest: it's time to trust teachers.

In this book, McLaughlin examines the eight strategies expert principals utilize to lead equitable, high achieving schools. Each chapter will include strategies, case studies, reflective questions and a chapter summary.

This practical book shares key lessons learned from highly effective, award-winning National Blue Ribbon Schools. Teacher Leadership Practice in High-Performing Schools explores the important role teachers have in leading schools, the balance administrators must strike between providing teachers with support and trusting them as professionals, and the ways that educators in these schools frequently collaborate across roles and do not operate in isolation. Following vignettes inspired by real schools, each chapter explains and unpacks key lessons learned, situates these lessons within the literature, offers readers robust tools to apply these lessons in their own schools, and includes questions designed to encourage reflection on school practices. This exciting new book helps schools, leadership teams, and individual educators reflect on teacher leadership practice in their schools and determine concrete next steps to increase and improve the impact of teacher leadership.

Leadership in America’s Best Urban Schools describes and demystifies the qualities that successful leaders rely on to make a difference at all levels of urban school leadership. Grounded in research, this volume reveals the multiple challenges that real urban elementary, middle, and high schools face as well as the catalysts for improvement. This insightful resource explores the critical leadership characteristics found in high-performing urban schools and gives leaders the tools to move their schools to higher levels of achievement for all students—but especially for those who are low-income, English-language learners, and from various racial and ethnic backgrounds. In shining a light on the essential qualities for exceptional leadership at all levels of urban schools, this book is a valuable guide for all educators and administrators to nurture, influence, support, and sustain excellence and equity at their schools.

In Teacher Leadership, Lieberman and Miller discuss current changes in the teacher's role, and make sense of the research on teacher leadership. They offer case studies of innovative programs - such as the National Writing Project - that provide teachers with opportunities to lead within a professional community. In addition, they tell stories of individual teachers - from Maine to California - who are able to lead in a variety of contexts. Teacher Leadership offers a new standard of teaching and community that recognizes all teachers as leaders. It shows how to develop learning communities that include rather than exclude, create knowledge rather than merely apply it, and that offer challenge and support to both new and experienced teachers. This book is a volume in the Jossey-Bass Leadership Library in Education - a series designed to meet the demand for new ideas and insights about leadership in schools.

For many years, the authors have been fellow travelers on the journey to help educators improve their schools. Their first coauthored book focuses on district leadership, principal leadership, and team leadership and addresses how individual teachers can be most effective in leading students—by learning with colleagues how to implement the most promising pedagogy in their classrooms

Our fourth book in the International Research on School Leadership series focuses on school leadership in an era of high stakes accountability. Fueled by sweeping federal education accountability reforms, such as the United States’ No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race to the Top (R2T) and Australia’s Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce, school systems around the world are being forced to increase academic standards, participate in high-stakes testing, and raise evaluation standards for teachers and principals. These results-driven reforms are intended to hold educators “accountable for student learning and accountable to the public” (Anderson, 2005, p. 2, emphasis in original). While policymakers and the public debate the merits of student achievement accountability measures, P-12 educational leaders do not have the luxury to wait for clear guidance and resources to improve their schools and operating systems. Instead, successful leaders must balance the need to create learning communities, manage the organizational climate, and encourage community involvement with the consequences testing has on teacher morale and public scrutiny. The chapters in this volume clearly indicate that as school leaders attend to these potentially competing forces, this affects their problem-solving strategies, ability to facilitate change, and encourage community involvement. We were delighted with the responses from colleagues around the world who were eager to share their research dealing with how leaders are functioning effectively within a high-accountability environment. The nine chapters in this volume provide empirical evidence of the strategies school leaders use to cope with problems and negotiate external demands while improving student performance. In particular, the voices and actions of principals, superintendents, and school board members are captured in a blend of quantitative and qualitative studies. The breadth of studies is impressive, ranging from case studies of individual principals to cross-district comparisons to national data from the National Center for Education Statistics. To highlight important findings, we have organized the book into five sections. The first section (Chapters 2, 3, and 4) highlights the problem-solving strategies used by principals and superintendents when pressured to turn around low-performing schools. In the second section (Chapters 5 and 6), attention is devoted to ways in which school leaders act as “buffers” by reducing the impact of external demands within their local school contexts. Next, Chapters 7 and 8 explore creative ways in which financial analyses can be used to assess the cost effectiveness of programs and services. Chapters 9 and 10 examine how principals enact their instructional leadership roles in managing curriculum reforms and evaluating teachers. Finally, in the last section (Chapter 11), Kenneth Leithwood synthesizes the major themes and ideas emerging across these chapters, paying particular attention to practical issues influencing school leaders in this era of school reform and accountability as well as promising areas for future research.