Leader

Resource Check

Education Resource Strategies (ERS) is an organization that provides resources and tools that aim to change the way people, time, and money are used in urban education to dramatically improve student learning. Resources on ERS’s webpage on teaching innovation include publications and case studies that focus on rethinking and redesigning teacher compensation systems to attract, reward, and retain talent and ideas on how to restructure the teaching job to emphasize teacher teams, differentiated roles, and opportunities to develop and increase impact.

School Design: Leveraging Talent, Time, and Money, Online Self-Assessment

The increasing urgency to design schools the help students better achieve combined with budget reductions have made it increasingly important to make smart and efficient investments. This Education Resource Strategies report, however, finds that the opposite is occurring. Multiple school districts have practices that perpetuate existing school structures that don’t work and are creating barriers to the development of excellent schools. This guide offers guidance for school districts to fix these severe misalignments so that effective school designs may be implemented. 

First-Year Principals in Urban Districts: How Actions and Working Conditions Relate to Outcomes

This RAND report examines the actions and working conditions experienced by first-year principals and connects these factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. By researching the experiences of first-year principals in six districts, the report seeks to understand relationships among student achievement outcomes, new principals’ likelihood of staying at their schools and their reports about school conditions, attitudes, and their own practices.

Re-Imagining State Policy: A Guide to Building Systems That Support Effective Principals

New Leaders assembled a guide to the state’s role in each of the policy areas that affect school leadership—specifically principals. The paper identifies opportunities available for state leaders to improve policies designed to attract and ultimately retain and empower the best school leaders who will drive students toward success. The document advocates for the adoption of high-quality principal performance standards, which would align the vision across the entire human capital system from pipeline development to reward or dismissal. 

Shooting for Stars: Cross-Sector Lessons for Retaining High-Performing Educators

This report by Public Impact identifies four common strategies employed by other sectors to disproportionately retain high performers and discusses how committed education leaders could begin applying these strategies right now. The four key strategies organizations successfully use to boost high-performer retention are as follows:

Closing the Talent Gap

McKinsey draws on its experience of working with school systems in more than 50 countries to produce a report that examines the practice of the top-performing school systems in the world and examines how these countries make recruiting the “top third+” students of their academic cohort a priority, and in return, develop some of the most effective teachers.

State Policy Database

The Education Commission of the States’ database—updated weekly—tracks legislation, rules/regulations, and executive orders on a variety of education issues, including teacher and leadership recruitment, retention, induction, and tenure. 

Teacher Talent Toolbox

This toolbox, prepared for by The New Teacher Project, is a collection of 250 resources garnered from 50 schools and districts. Areas of focus include teacher recruitment, hiring, and retention, and cover topics ranging from using student growth measures and teacher evaluation to instructional planning and professional development. 

Importing Leaders for School Turnarounds: Lessons and Opportunities

One of the biggest challenges in education today is identifying talented candidates to successfully lead turnarounds of persistently low-achieving schools. Evidence suggests that the traditional principal pool is already stretched to capacity and cannot supply enough leaders to fix failing schools. But potentially thousands of leaders capable of managing successful turnarounds work outside education, in nonprofit and health organizations, the military, and the private sector.

Using Competencies to Improve School Turnaround Principal Success

This report, produced by Public Impact for the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program, describes how using competencies that predict performance can improve turnaround principal selection, evaluation, and development. Although the term “competency” often describes any work-related skill, in this context competencies are the underlying motives and habits—patterns of thinking, feeling, acting, and speaking—that cause a person to be successful in a specific job or role.

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