Even in the face of political transition, Georgia has made critical gains in education by identifying and enhancing the knowledge and skills of leaders; aligning preparation programs and workplace standards; and uniting the state’s political leaders around the urgent needs for school leaders.
With support from The Wallace Foundation, Georgia has taken significant steps to improve the effectiveness of leaders in schools and districts across the state. The state has established a public/private partnership devoted to increasing stakeholder engagement around strengthening student achievement, with improving leadership as a critical strategy for accomplishing this goal. The state also established, through The Wallace Foundation and other funding sources, the Georgia Leadership Institute for School Improvement (GLISI) to deliver training, conduct research and evaluation of educational leadership, and inform policymakers on issues affecting the quality of educational leadership. The institute works with practitioners and policymakers to make use of data to drive school improvement across the state.
With renewed funding from Wallace, the next phase of Georgia’s efforts will focus on building stronger collaborative relationships between the state and districts; recruiting, training, and developing a corps of talented leaders; and providing principals with a model for sharing responsibility with teacher leaders in the school to allow them to concentrate on impacting student performance.
To achieve these goals, Georgia has developed a comprehensive strategy for ensuring that potential principals build a vision of effective leadership that is suited to the unique challenges of urban and other high-need school environments.
The state and districts also are working together to build a structure of performance-based incentives designed to improve the use of human resources through strategies to retain best teachers and leaders in highest-need schools, including salary upgrades, certification options, state and district career ladders, and leadership opportunities within the school and district. A key part of the strategy to recruit and retain skilled leaders has been to encourage teachers, who assume leadership roles in school, to become principals by altering certification and licensure.
Georgia is also putting a series of incentives in place to encourage university and K-12 partners to work collaboratively on initiatives for shared responsibility of student achievement and alignment of training and professional development standards. The collaborating partners are building differentiated training and professional development programs to specifically prepare leaders for urban and other high-need schools, and refining state performance standards for school leaders to better reflect the district context.
Several districts are piloting initiatives that will implement distributed leadership models in schools, set standards for success, and document the results. These models are being implemented to change organizational culture so that principals can receive greater administrative and professional support from colleagues and focus on the primary goal of raising student achievement.