Leadership Development on a Large Scale

Lessons for Long-Term Success

Kenneth Leithwood

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781544342191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Effective school leadership can have a transformative impact on the lives of students. Written by one of the foremost scholars in the field. this book draws lessons from one of the most successful long-term educational leadershipstudies ever conducted to provide actionable advice and specific strategies.Learn howto:

• Understand the evidence base to design effective leadership development programs and initiatives
• Supportinstructional leaders inleading collaborative inquiryapproaches to classroom pedagogy to help teachers convey complex ideas to students
• Establish Principal Learning Teams to help guide school-wide and districtwide decision-making

Chapter 1 The Leading Student Achievement Networks for Learning Project (LSA)¹

¹ Originally called “Leading Student Achievement: Our Principal Purpose” and later renamed “Leading Student Achievement: Networks for Learning.” It is referred to simply as LSA throughout most of the book.

Talented leadership makes a significant contribution to the success of organizations. Absent such leadership, struggling organizations rarely regain their footing. This claim can now be justified by a considerable body of evidence collected in many different organizational sectors, especially evidence sufficiently fine grained to detect the nuances of organizational change; this claim also has become an article of faith among those responsible for organizational improvement. In education, as in many other sectors, the evidence and widespread belief about leadership contributions have resulted in a veritable tsunami of initiatives aimed at developing leadership capacity.

In spite of the attention driving these initiatives, however, surprisingly little is known about effective leadership development (Hallinger, in press) beyond what we already know about good teaching in almost any adult context. Even more critical, the development of leadership capacity on a large scale—the core problem to be solved if leadership’s potential is to be realized—has usually been addressed in ways that have been only loosely connected to the broader reform agendas found in the context of those “being developed.” For example, one of the most ambitious large-scale leadership development efforts until recently, England’s National College for School Leadership (since renamed), was created as an arm’s-length agency of the government, not as an integral part of the government’s school reform efforts.

This book describes the Leading Student Achievement (LSA) project, one approach to the large-scale development of practicing school leaders. Underway in the Canadian province of Ontario for more than a dozen years, the project remains an important component of the province’s overall strategy for improving the contribution of public schools to student success. A key goal of this book is to tease out insights from LSA’s long and successful experience that might be valuable in other contexts for large-scale leadership development. Such contexts would certainly include other provinces in Canada, leadership development centers wherever they might be found, as well as large districts. The U.S. Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), signed into law in 2015, provides opportunities to use federal funds for school leadership development. These opportunities seem likely to encourage large-scale initiatives in states and districts that we believe might also benefit from some of the hard-won insights acquired through LSA’s work over the past dozen years.

The Context

Ontario’s publicly funded school system is an amalgam of four subsystems, including both Catholic and public schools, as well as schools serving both English- and French-speaking students. Seventy-two school districts serve a highly diverse population of approximately 2.1 million K–12 students in vastly different regions ranging from large urban centers (such as Toronto, with 595 schools and students speaking over seventy-five different languages at home) to very small northern communities (e.g., Moose Factory, with one elementary school) serving a majority of aboriginal students. The average district in Ontario includes about thirty-six elementary and ten secondary schools.

During much of the twelve-year period during which LSA has so far been underway, the province’s public education system has been widely regarded by some external agencies as among the best in the world (Mourshed, Chijoke, & Barber, 2010). The school system achieved this status during the tenure of a liberal government, elected in 2003 and in power until the summer of 2018, following a decade of conflict and disruption under a conservative government considered by many to be hostile to public education. During both the earlier period of conflict and disruption and continuing through to 2017, districts and schools in the province have been subject to many of the typical trappings of accountability common to jurisdictions in many parts of the world. Those accountability-oriented Ontario initiatives include, for example, mandatory annual provincial testing of all students in Grades 3, 6, 9, and 10, accompanied by provincial growth targets that districts are expected to help meet. During LSA’s twelve-year life, begun in 2005, underperforming schools and their leaders have been targeted, as well, for the assistance of provincial “turnaround teams” (Leithwood, Harris, & Strauss, 2010). While not a system of inspection, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the provincial Ministry of Education, nevertheless, created a large team of “student achievement officers” with a mandate to work in all districts toward improving achievement under the direction of a senior provincial official. These achievement officers worked closely with LSA, as well, as part of their responsibilities. The Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat was the main source of financial support for LSA.

Many policies and procedures introduced during this twelve-year period were primarily aimed at supporting the work of districts and schools rather than simply holding them to account. Especially relevant to the work of the LSA project, these supports included the establishment of a branch of government focused on leadership development, along with the closely aligned Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL). Among the early initiatives of this branch and IEL was the preparation of the Ontario Leadership Framework (OLF), closely based on the best available evidence. The OLF (Leithwood, 2012) provides a set of leadership standards for the province and has been widely adopted by districts, professional administrator associations, and their individual members as a guide to effective practice, a framework for leadership development, and a set of criteria for leadership selection (Pollock, Wang, & Hauseman, 2017). A summary of the OLF, a central feature of LSA’s theory of action, can be found in Chapter 3.

With few exceptions, eligibility for appointment to a principal or vice principal position in Ontario requires five years of successful teaching experience, a graduate degree in a relevant field, and completion of the province’s Principal Qualification Program, a two-part program (120 hours each) regulated by the province but delivered by government-approved universities and principal associations. All participants in the LSA program have these qualifications and have been appointed to a formal school leadership position.

These practicing principals and vice principals belong to one of the three professional associations overseeing the project, including the Ontario Principals’ Council (OPC) for the 5,237 public school principals and vice principals, the Catholic Principals’ Council of Ontario (CPCO) for the 2,165 Catholic school administrators, and the Association des directions et des directions adjointes des ecoles franco-ontariennes (ADFO) for the 565 principals and vice principals in the province’s francophone schools. These three professional association have collaborated to guide the LSA project throughout its history with consistent and stable funding from the provincial government. Indeed, the government’s unwavering support, along with a climate of cooperation among most of the professional stakeholders in the province over the project’s twelve-year duration, to this point, have been critical to the project’s impact and spread.

In funding the LSA proposal, the Ministry of Education expressed its belief in the contribution of leadership to school improvement at the school, as well as the district and provincial levels. This chapter begins with a discussion about the extent to which this belief is justified.

The Contributions of Leadership to Student Learning

Leadership has captured the imagination of contemporary policy makers and educational reformers to an unprecedented extent. It is now widely viewed as both a central explanation for school effectiveness and one of the most powerful levers for improving schools. This belief in the power of good leadership has prompted an enormous number of initiatives, in many parts of the world, to improve the capacities of both aspiring and existing leaders. While the “poster child” for these efforts remains England’s National College for School Leadership, other very ambitious initiatives are not hard to locate in almost all developed countries (e.g., Huber & West, 2002). Belief in the generative power of good leadership has also stimulated and reinforced advocacy for “distributed” (Leithwood, Mascall, & Strauss, 2009) and “shared” (Pearce & Conger, 2003) conceptions of leadership. If leadership is such a good thing, many reason, the more people doing “it,” the better, whether or not they hold formal leadership positions.

As is typical of most efforts to improve schools, the choice of leadership development as a strategy has been only partly rational. While this choice has been undeniably influenced by research evidence, at least as influential has been the contemporary “romance”² with leadership, especially in Western societies, a “bias for action” lionized in popular media and the neoliberal-sponsored “new managerialism” turn in public administration (e.g., Peters, 1992). Almost all planned leadership development efforts, however, consume substantial resources and incur significant opportunity costs. In a more fully rational policy world, those advocating leadership development as a strategy for improving student achievement would more carefully weigh the relevant research evidence in helping to sort out the pros and cons of placing their bets on leadership development. Such evidence does not justify leadership development as a stand-alone strategy for improving student achievement. Such evidence does, however, justify including leadership development as a key part of almost any comprehensive large-scale reform strategy. But to realize its potential contribution to an overall reform strategy, leadership development needs to be carefully aligned with other elements of that overall strategy.

² We use this term after Meindl (1995), who argues that leadership provides a simple explanation for organizational behavior that actually has multiple, complex causes.

A Critical View of the Evidence

Evidence typically cited in support of further developing leadership capacity in schools is predictably less conclusive than such advocacy would suggest. This evidence has been generated by both quantitative and qualitative studies. The sobering news about evidence from quantitative leadership studies³ is actually pretty obvious. First, although typically the product of large-scale research, almost all of this evidence reports relationships between some set of leadership practices and a selection of valued organizational and student outcomes. Evidence from such correlational research provides only weak support for the sort of causal claims that are foundational to leadership development advocacy. Second, relationships reported in these studies are typically statistically significant but small. Realistically, then, how much improvement in achievement can be expected from marginal expansion of leaders’ capacities resulting from well-designed leadership development programs?

³ Much of this research has been systematically reviewed in Leithwood and Riehl (2005); Leithwood, Seashore Louis, Wahlstrom, and Anderson (2004); and Marzano, Waters, and McNulty (2006).

Limitations of the evidence produced by qualitative leadership research⁴ are equally obvious. While this moderate-sized body of research, unlike its large-scale quantitative sibling, often reports greater gains in student achievement over time attributable to the efforts of talented leaders, the small-scale nature of the studies makes applications to other settings hazardous. Additionally, almost all such studies have used relatively weak “outlier designs.” Studies using these designs sample only leadership in schools whose students perform at the extremes of the achievement distribution. These studies do not produce comparable evidence about how much of what is described as “successful” leadership might also be found in less successful schools. As a consequence, these studies tell us something about the “necessary” but not the “sufficient” practices of successful leaders.

⁴ A related series of such studies has been reported in Day and Leithwood (2007), for example.

Perhaps as serious a weakness, finally, leadership studies using outlier designs begin with the assumption that leadership is a major cause for the improvements in student achievement, as has been demonstrated by the exceptionally performing schools selected for study. Sometimes, evidence confirming the contribution of leadership is collected from teachers or those in other roles, but that is the extent to which this critical starting assumption is tested, and often, it not tested at all. There are many plausible explanations, in addition to leadership, for significant increases in a school’s performance. But types of research aside, there is almost no direct evidence linking improvements in leadership, fostered by serious leadership development efforts, to improvements in student achievement.⁵

⁵ See Leithwood, Riedlinger, Bauer, and Jantzi (2003) for one of the very few exceptions.

A More Optimistic Assessment of the Evidence

In spite of this sobering conclusion from the evidence, there remains significant justification for using leadership development as a strategy for improving student achievement. This justification is based on six features of the relevant evidence. First, although typically reporting small effects on or weak relationships with student achievement, the evidence consistently indicates that these effects or relationships are both positive and significant. Second, leadership effects reported in the evidence are moderate to large on many organizational variables, which are themselves strongly associated with student learning (e.g., school culture and agreement about school goals). This evidence is in line with claims that leadership effects on students are largely indirect (Hallinger & Heck, 1996; Leithwood & Jantzi, 1999).

In addition, there are no reported instances, of which we are aware, of a failing school turning itself around in the absence of talented leadership. Leadership effects appear to be largest where they are needed most. Furthermore, the database concerning leaderships effects is now at least as impressive in both quantity (roughly one hundred quantitative and many more qualitative studies) and reported effects as are the databases about most other variables selected for attention in school reform efforts—and considerably better than many. Finally, borrowing the concept from Creemers and Reezigt (1996), most school and classroom variables have “synergistic effects.” That is, considered independently, their effects may be small, often not larger than the effects reported for school leadership. It is the coordinated accumulation of these small effects that can add up to large improvements. School leaders are key stimulators and coordinators of these small effects.

Conclusions From the Evidence

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn about leadership development as a strategy for improving student achievement is that as a stand-alone strategy, leadership development is unlikely to produce significant gains in student achievement, however well it is implemented. While leadership development might have large effects in some schools, especially (and importantly) in struggling schools, these effects will not be large enough to influence patterns of achievement across a large educational jurisdiction, such as a country, state, province, or even a large district.

Few educational jurisdictions, however, stake their improvement efforts exclusively on leadership development. But this is not the same as embedding leadership development within and aligning it to the more comprehensive reform effort. Since very few jurisdictions have proceeded in this way, the large effects that are possible through synergistic relations across many variables (including leadership), each responsible for small effects, have almost never materialized. Multiple, nonaligned changes in schools have simply produced feelings of confusion, overload, stress, and low morale on the part of school staffs (Leithwood, 2006).

These conclusions and implications based on the evidence suggest a reform strategy that includes but is clearly not limited to leadership development—a strategy in which the parts are carefully aligned. To have their greatest effect, leadership development initiatives should be part of a suite of coordinated strategies, not a stand-alone strategy. Relatively new evidence from research on large-scale reform also points toward two additional features of such a comprehensive strategy. First, it now seems clear that un...