Educational Leaders and Why Effective Schools Matter

A school does not improve on its own. A reform-minded official can write a new curriculum, a donor can pay for new buildings, the government can raise teacher salaries, and the school can still stay the same. What changes a school is a leader inside the building who refuses to let it stay the same. That is why the conversation about effective schools usually becomes a conversation about leadership.

The rising importance of school leadership

The world a school operates in does not stand still. Curricula change. Technology arrives. Parents who used to defer to the head now ask sharp questions. Government policy shifts. The student mix changes as cities grow and migrate.

David Green made the point in 2000:

Those organisations will survive and flourish which have change leaders. These are the individuals who thrive on chaos and actively seek to make the future.

Schools are no exception. A school head who can navigate change keeps the school useful to its community. A school head who waits for change to settle down watches the school become irrelevant.

Why fewer people apply for school leadership

The same forces that make leadership necessary also make the job hard to fill. Four reasons recur in the research:

1. Ambiguity of change. A head does not always know what the next policy or board rule will be. Living with that uncertainty is uncomfortable.
2. Complexity of the role. A head is a manager of staff, a curriculum lead, a finance officer, a community liaison, a complaints handler, and a public face all at once.
3. Status of the profession. In many countries, school heads earn less than mid-career corporate managers and get less public respect.
4. Impact on family life. The job spills into evenings, weekends, and school holidays.

Brian Caldwell summed it up in 2003 with a deliberately dry sentence:

Being a head is a great job, especially if you do not weaken.

He was both warning and recruiting. The job rewards people who can hold the line. It punishes people who cannot.

Why we needed effective schools research in the first place

Until the late 1960s, much of the published research on school outcomes implied that what mattered most was the child’s home background. The Coleman Report in the United States in 1966 had become widely cited for the claim that schools made far less difference than families. Many policymakers, especially in low-income contexts, took this to mean that fixing schools was a waste of effort.

Dr Larry Lezotte and his colleagues, including Ron Edmonds and Wilbur Brookover, refused that conclusion. They studied schools that produced strong learning for poor and minority students despite the home-background pattern. They asked what those schools had in common. Out of that work came the correlates of effective schools, a research-based list of features that mark schools where all children learn.

The promise underneath

The promise behind this research is moral, not just empirical. The researchers were saying that no child should be written off because of who their parents are. Every child can learn at least the essentials:

1. Knowledge. The facts and information of the curriculum.
2. Concepts. The ideas and principles that organise the facts.
3. Skills. The ability to use the knowledge and concepts in practice.

If a child reaches the next grade with those three in place, they can keep learning. If they reach the next grade without them, the gap compounds. The school’s job is to make sure the basics are mastered, regardless of background.

Flashcard

What did Lezotte, Edmonds, and Brookover prove with the effective schools research?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Schools do make a difference, even for poor or marginalised children.

Earlier 1960s research, especially the Coleman Report, had implied that home background determined learning more than schools did. Lezotte and colleagues studied schools where poor children learned well anyway. They identified the correlates that those schools shared. Their finding was that a school can reliably teach knowledge, concepts, and skills to every child, regardless of background, when the right features are in place.

Why belief in school impact matters

A leader who does not believe schools can make a real difference will not work hard enough to make them effective. A leader who does believe will look for the levers. The correlates of effective schools are those levers. Topics like leadership theory, management functions, decision making, motivation, conflict, and change all build on the same starting point: a school can teach every child the essentials when the right features are in place.