central office silos; and
•
Performance-oriented leadership on the part of the
superintendent and others throughout the central
office. Such leadership, like that in some high-
performing private firms, involves leaders continu-
ously teaching staff how to change in ways that
support reform goals while those leaders strive to
become smarter about the work themselves.
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Importantly, our conclusions dig beneath research
findings that are common in other studies to reveal the
work practices and capacity of staff that we associated
with building schools’ capacity for improving teaching
and learning. For example, some researchers argue that
central offices that realize improved results have per-
formance management systems, but we have worked
with many districts that have performance management
systems but that have not realized improved results.
15
We found it was not enough for districts to simply
have performance management systems. The systems
mattered when they generated data that staff saw as rel-
evant to informing their daily work and when the sys-
tems helped staff use the data to actually improve. In the
following three sections, I summarize some of these prac-
tices within the broad categories of intensive partner-
ships, a shift to services, and new leadership.
Intensive Partnerships between Central Offices and
Principals.
Transforming districts understand that they
exist to help schools build their capacity for high-quality
instruction in all classrooms and that their support of
school principals’ development as instructional leaders is
essential to realizing those results. Such a focus reflects a
growing body of research that reveals principals’ key role
in helping to improve the performance of their teachers.
16
These roles for principals, sometimes called “instruc-
tional leadership” or “human capital manager” roles,
involve principals serving as main agents in the strategic
recruitment, selection, development, and retention of
teachers. With this emphasis on principal leadership,
transforming systems move beyond old education debates
regarding whether reform should be top-down or bottom-
up and pursue a wholly different alternative—a partner-
ship relationship between the central office and schools
aimed at supporting principals and holding them and
their central office partners accountable for results.
With these partnerships, districts avoid the limita-
tions of occasional part-time coaching by frontline staff
or contractors. Instead, districts dedicate executive-level
central office staff to supporting principals’ development
as instructional leaders. Such partnerships elevate the
importance of principal instructional leadership by mak-
ing support for such results the responsibility of staff
who report directly to the superintendent or his or her
chief officers. The location of this responsibility at the
executive level also effectively shrinks the size of the
central office for principals, increasing the potential for
better communication between themselves and the
