Report, Book, Webinars Show How Principals Can Drive Learning

A new paper from The Wallace Foundation explores how school leaders influence student achievement. The findings are mirrored in the recently published Getting It Done: Leading Academic Success in Unexpected Schools by the Ed Trust’s own Karin Chenoweth and Christina Theokas. An ongoing webinar series, organized by Chenoweth and Theokas, and cosponsored by Ed Trust and Wallace, digs deeper into how effective principals can help vulnerable children learn to high levels.

Five core leadership responsibilities emerge from Wallace’s 10 years of research, including: shaping a vision for student success and improving instruction, developing staff members through support and coaching, and overhauling schools through practices such as creating a positive culture and fostering collaboration. The Wallace paper concludes by calling for efforts to boost recruitment, training, evaluation, and development of leaders at school and district levels.

In Getting it Done, Chenoweth and Theokas report that effective principals believe hiring and firing is not the sole solution to the challenge of getting an effective teacher into every classroom. Instead they devote considerable time and energy to cultivating and supporting strong teachers.

In their next webinar , slated for Jan. 26,  Chenoweth and Theokas will lead a conversation with three successful school leaders — John Capozzi, principal, and Diane Scricca, former principal, both of Elmont Memorial High School, Elmont, N.Y., and Barbara Adderley, former principal of M. Hall Stanton Elementary, Philadelphia, Pa. — who will explain how they’ve used evaluations and professional development to help teachers.

The webinar series, Getting It Done, and the new work by The Wallace Foundation all point to the difference that education leaders can make in the most important metric of all: student learning.

— Paula Amann