Home

Making It Happen

There is no curriculum, philosophy, or reform agenda that will magically improve urban schools. Many different programs work. What makes a difference in outcomes for children is leadership.

It Starts At The Top

Schools all over America have proven that children from the most challenged backgrounds can learn at high levels. Unfortunately, these schools tend to be anomalies, often existing outside the “regular” system, or succeeding in spite of district policies rather than because of them. Few urban districts have been able to take success to scale, and the barriers to doing so are formidable. Developing district-wide systems to recruit, train, and support highly effective educators dedicated to educating children in poverty is enormously difficult. It requires courageous leadership, able to build consensus for significant changes to the status quo.

Good Schools Have Good Leaders

Good schools almost always have good principals. A school principal has a greater span of control than the leader of almost any similarly complex organization, but often begins the job with little experience managing people, projects or outcomes. Principals are the key leverage point for improving schools, yet we pay far too little attention to the position. Successful urban school districts find innovative ways to recruit, develop, and train principals who are both sound educational leaders and skilled managers; put in place practical, coherent, and sustained systems to support them; give them the responsibility to choose and manage their own staffs; and hold them accountable for results.

Although Leadership Starts at the Top, Teachers are the Key

What ultimately matters for students happens in the classroom. Good principals create school cultures that insist on high standards, recruit teachers who will be good fits for their school, train teachers well, provide them with feedback, and build cultures in which teachers collaborate to improve their practices and to enhance learning for all students. Successful districts recruit teachers who are likely to be successful, create tangible and intangible rewards for good teaching, focus their professional development programs on school-level results, put in place meaningful assessment and evaluation systems, and support principals in dealing with persistently ineffective teachers.

My Work

I came to urban education as a calling, after practicing law in America’s largest law firms and serving as a senior executive in the financial services business. I believe that giving urban children a fair chance is the most important issue facing our country today, and that if we have the courage to change we can break the cycle of poverty in one generation. I received a Ph.D. in educational administration in 2005, focusing my research and experience on educational reform, student learning and motivation, principal and teacher quality, and statistical measures of student learning growth. Currently, I am Vice President for Human Capital Systems at The New Teacher Project (TNTP), where I spend most of my time helping states and large urban school districts build new systems bring excellent teaching to scale, including developing organization-wide strategies for managing human capital, recruiting and staffing, supporting principals and their managers as instructional leaders, and designing and implementing evaluation systems. Previously, I was the Senior Executive for New And Innovative Schools in the Cleveland School District.  From 2006 to 2008 I was Executive Director for School Leadership for New York City Schools. Sorry my website is out of date.  I’ll update it someday, when thing slow down.  Thanks for visiting —- Leigh LM529@aol.com