General Resources

Prioritizing Leadership: New Leaders Federal Policy Platform

This webpage, published by New Leaders, includes a series of briefs that encourage a greater focus on school leadership at the federal level. The five-part series encourages policymakers to consider how various policies will impact a principal throughout his or her career. The briefs focus on creating a shared vision of leadership, pipeline development, preservice preparation, evaluation and management, and retention and rewards.

New Teacher Induction in Special Education

This research—published by the Center on Personnel Studies in Special Education— addresses four concerns regarding special education teacher induction: (1) the high attrition rate in special education; (2) the potential for beginning teachers—who are struggling to adapt to their new role—to provide inadequate services to children and youth with disabilities; (3) the increasing reliance on alternative routes to certification; and (4) the unique conditions within which special educators work.

Teacher Retention: Reducing the Attrition of Special Educators

The IRIS Center at Vanderbilt University developed this five-part, online, interactive module to highlight how to best support—and therefore retain—special educators, with a particular focus on the key steps school administrators can take to create a productive and inviting work environment.

Teacher Induction: Providing Comprehensive Training for New Special Educators

This five-part, online module, created by the IRIS Center, highlights that administrative support is critical for new special education teachers and demonstrates how teacher support can boost effectiveness in the classroom.

Laying the Foundation for Successful School Leadership

Based on a review of the existing literature, this report (published by the RAND Corporation) provides a set of recommendations designed to help districts and states create conditions that foster principal success. Key recommendations include matching the correct candidate to the correct school, ensuring that resources are available to new principals, instituting high-quality evaluation systems for principals, and providing school leaders with greater autonomy. 

Perspectives of Irreplaceable Teachers

This report, produced by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), documents the perspectives of 117 of America’s best teachers, with the hope that their feedback can be used to strengthen the profession. The report highlights the following key findings: (1) Teachers have a tumultuous relationship with their profession; (2) Teachers value a wide range of measures to determine success in the classroom; and (3) Teachers do not attribute much of their success to formal preparation programs.

Central Office Transformation Toolkit

The Central Office Transformation Toolkit—published by the Center for Educational Leadership at the University of Washington and The Wallace Foundation—provides district leaders with three tools to reform central offices and strengthen their capacity to function as primary support systems for principals as they work to improve teaching and learning.

Retaining Teacher Talent: The View From Generation Y

This publication, by Learning Point Associates and Public Agenda, examines how best to retain teacher talent among Generation Y, the cohort born between 1977 and 1995. As this group becomes increasingly large share of the teaching workforce, attention must be paid to Gen Y’s needs and preferences to ensure that these teachers are retained. The observations in this report come from a national, random-sample survey of 890 public school teachers.

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.

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