A model guide for reconceiving the central office to help educational leaders build equity-aligned, research-based approaches to district reform. In From Tinkering to Transformation, Meredith Honig and Lydia Rainey call on superintendents and other district leaders to rethink the very premises that underlie the long-standing ways of working in their central offices. Based on the results of nearly two decades of research from districts of 2,000 to 200,000 students, Honig and Rainey pinpoint how central offices support equitable teaching and learning in schools through specific changes in key central office functions: teaching and learning, human resources, principal supervision, operations, and the superintendent's cabinet. Using lively case studies, detailed examples, and performance data from ten US school districts, Honig and Rainey deftly highlight how central offices must transform in order to support equitable teaching and learning in schools. They identify typical pitfalls district leaders may encounter, illustrate a guiding set of design principles that can be used to inform transformation efforts, and offer practical advice on how to realize the ambitious goals of fundamental systemic change for equity. This inspiring work shows how district leaders can move forward with revolutionary central office reforms that support equitable teaching and learning for every student.

Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership specifies the conditions that district leaders can create to help principal supervisors take a teaching and learning approach to their work. Based on their extensive research in district central offices, Meredith I. Honig and Lydia R. Rainey show how supervisors can most effectively support principals in becoming instructional leaders and developing the capacity to lead their own learning. "Supervising Principals for Instructional Leadership is a brilliant, inspiring, clear book that nails what it means to supervise school leaders for growth and helps the reader reimagine the role of the central office. Read this book, and use it immediately!" --Michael Fullan, professor emeritus, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto "What does it look and sound like to support principals to lead learning? Honig and Rainey share their research-and-practice-tested wisdom, which combines the imagination to break free of conventional supervision with clear examples of what to do and what not to do, and a bundle of tools to make it happen." --Elizabeth A. City, senior lecturer on education, Harvard Graduate School of Education "For too long the work of principal supervision has been a black box; Honig and Rainey open up that box and provide practical steps for system leaders to take to support principals so that instruction improves for every child in every school. Their systemic approach is a must-read for any public education leader." --Joshua P. Starr, chief executive officer, PDK International "This finely crafted book about a critical school improvement problem is guided by a strong theory, builds on an impressively rich body of evidence, and includes many practical illustrations of the guiding theory in action. District leaders aiming to improve instruction in their schools will find much of value to their efforts in this text." --Kenneth Leithwood, emeritus professor, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto Meredith I. Honig is a professor of Education Policy, Organizations, and Leadership at the University of Washington, Seattle. Lydia R. Rainey is a research scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of research for the District Leadership Design Lab.

This project examines how eight state education agencies engaged the charge of improving their lowest-performing schools. The states examined are among the most active and intentional in this regard. In many ways, they are at the leading edge of what could eventually become 50 different experiments in performance management. By focusing on states at the forefront of the turnaround effort, the authors hope to identify promising paths that SEAs can follow as they shift the focus of their departments away from ensuring compliance and toward managing for improved performance. This report begins by briefly discussing prior research on the role of state agencies in supporting struggling schools. It then identifies the logic of school reform that guides their processes. Importantly, all of the states examined here start from nearly the same point, a federally defined set of steps by which they are bound, and they share certain elements of change. For example, they all used data to guide their work, restructured their organizations, and embraced the principles of transparency and clarity in communicating their intentions. They established a sense of urgency to build momentum for reform, leveraged the threat of federal requirements, and relied upon strong leadership, though in differing manners and to differing degrees. Finally, the report examines the overall strategic visions that guide SEAs' efforts to improve schools. These visions represent the greatest variation in terms of how SEAs approach school improvement. Undergirding these strategies are very different theories of action and expectations about the role of local education agencies (LEAs). It is too early to identify one strategic approach that is best in all situations. Each was implemented only recently and is embedded in a particular set of circumstances. Interestingly, they all share a common implicit assumption that enough administrative, teaching, and school leadership talent--either in terms of individuals or organizations--can be developed or recruited to support the reform effort. While the overall prognosis is uncertain as to the best transformation path, it is clear that any approach relies on recruiting enough talent to drive the effort. New Jersey Department of Education Organizational Charts 2010 and 2011 are appended. (Contains 2 figures, 2 tables and 36 footnotes.).

Increasingly, educational policies include mandates for school leaders to use data to "drive" their school-level decisions about instructional improvement. Extant research suggests that school leaders are trying to use data in their school-level instructional improvement decisions--decisions that impact instruction across multiple classrooms--but provides little guidance about the types of data school leaders use and how they use them when making such decisions. This dissertation begins to address these gaps through a qualitative, embedded case study of two middle schools implementing data-driven decision making at the school-level. Drawing on concepts from the theory of organizational decision making under conditions of uncertainty and ambiguity, the study relies heavily on observational methods to examine the full breadth of data school leaders use, how they use them, and how data usage relates to the outcomes of the decisions. Findings reveal that the leaders in the two study schools used a broad array of data, including student test scores, data on their schools' resources, data on the implementation of current programs and school operations, and data on potential strategies, programs, or interventions. Because these data were rarely available, the school leaders spent significant amounts of time gathering additional data and they, at times, used their personal knowledge in place of data. Further, this study demonstrates that leaders used these data throughout the decision making process, and that how leaders used these data was related to the outcomes of the decisions.