A new approach to leadership is needed to ensure that school systems equitably and effectively prepare all their community’s young people to succeed.

Our cultural landscape is filled with images of the individual hero battling against the diabolical forces of evil or the dead weight of ineptitude. In public policy, as in film and television, the solution to large and complex problems is often portrayed as finding the right hero to sweep in and save the day.

Education reform has its own versions of this heroic narrative: leaders such as the new superintendent who inherits a slew of challenges from the previous administration, the mayor who takes over a struggling school district, or the outside expert who brings in a new reform model are sometimes seen as lone superstars who fix a problem without help – or with active resistance - from the community and other stakeholders in their districts.

But more and more education leaders are finding that a different approach to leadership yields better results and greater equity. These leaders see their role less as superheroes and gatekeepers and more as partners and conveners of the many sectors that must work together to meet the challenges of eliminating systemic inequities and preparing their community’s young people to succeed in the twentyfirst-century postsecondary world.

The Annenberg Institute for School Reform supports this view. Through our work in urban districts around the country over the last decade, we have come to see leadership as collective, rather than individual, and as embedded in local context, practice, and relationships, rather than embodied in a particular reform model, leadership style, or individual action. This concept of leadership has also been informed by evolving bodies of work by scholars such as James Spillane (2009, 2006) in his seminal work on distributed leadership and a “leader-plus” approach. Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley (2009) have gone further to consider distributed leadership an essential element of sustainable leadership, which focuses on building capacity and leadership succession as part of a “dynamic and integrated strategy for change” (p. 97).

Leadership in Smart Education Systems

Our work with districts and their partners is consistent with Hargreaves and Shirley’s view. Shared leadership is not simply a nice extra – it’s an essential foundation for sustainable, equitable improvements to school systems at scale. It’s not enough to bring together a diverse group of people around a table to talk, or for charismatic leaders to bring together small teams to create pockets of excellence within a struggling, dismally performing district. Shared leadership must take place within large-scale, high-functioning, cross-sector partnerships across an entire district and community that support young people’s learning and development in a broad range of outcomes, both inside and outside of school – especially in historically under-served communities.

We call such a network of partnerships a smart education system (Simmons 2007, 2009). Each sector of the community – educators, administrators, parents, youth, community organizations, elected officials, funders, universities, unions, businesses, and civic organizations, among others – has a role to play in this network and assets to contribute, and each sector must develop the capacity to constructively participate and to hold itself accountable for results. The goal is to improve student results through two major strategies:

• ensuring that learning opportunities and supports both inside and outside of schools are equitable, comprehensive, and aligned;
• using evidence as a basis for transparent decision making and mutual accountability among partners.

These strategies require all shareholder groups to invest substantial time and effort in building relationships, leadership skills, and the capacity to work together. In this article we will look at some of the school communities around the country who are doing this hard work and the implications for district leadership. The outcomes are encouraging, and many of the lessons learned can be applied to other communities.

What a Community Can Bring to the Table

The voices most often left out of the debates around education policy belong to the very people who are most affected: the parents, young people, and other residents of low-income, high-minority communities with struggling schools. When these groups are not included in the discussion, it’s easy for other shareholders to assume that academic failure is due to a lack of interest, intellectual capacity, or morals on the part of students, families, and communities. These assumptions, or simply a lack of knowledge of community needs, sometimes lead policy-makers to design solutions that do little to address the problems – or that abandon the attempt to improve the district at scale altogether and concentrate on fostering excellence for a limited number of students.¹ (See Simmons 2009 for an analysis of the lack of inclusion of community voices and equity concerns in federal policy.)

But our work has also shown that many parent, community, and youth groups have built the capacity to develop leaders, gather and interpret data, present evidence to policy-makers, design solutions, form alliances around common interests, attract resources, gain meaningful participation in decision making, and apply pressure when necessary – and that when this happens, they have become effective and powerful partners in school reform.

This view of the community as bringing independent assets to the table rather than needing intervention for its deficiencies was amply supported by a recent six-year study that examined the influence of community and youth organizing for education reform in seven urban communities.² For more information about the study and to download the case studies, see www.annenberginstitute.org/WeDo/Mott.php. District administrators and city officials in all the sites gave ample credit to parent and youth organizing groups for calling attention to serious problems and coming up with innovative solutions that brought concrete improvements to the school system.

• In Oakland, an initiative by an organized community transformed the district by converting all high schools to small schools, resulting in a significant increase in student achievement. The study found that the community organization “received unequivocal credit from district administrators, teachers, and other key stakeholders for its role in winning the small schools policy” (Shah, Mediratta & McAlister 2009b, p. 1).
• In South Los Angeles, youth leaders gathered data showing vast disparities in course offerings across Los Angeles; curricula in their community’s high schools prepared them for low-wage jobs, not college. A youth-led campaign to apply a rigorous curriculum more equitably convinced the Los Angeles school board to mandate a college preparatory curriculum in all Los Angeles high schools. The school board president called the mandate “one of the most significant reforms this district is embarking on in the last twenty years” (Shah, Mediratta & McAlister 2009a, p. 19).