|
Did You Know?
SFUSD serves over 56,000 students in 104 K-12 schools. 55% of those students qualify for free or reduced lunch, and 30% are English Language Learners.
|
California’s Public Education “Adequacy Study” was released in early March, and we are pleased to share some of its most compelling findings with you—findings which provide persuasive evidence that our Leadership Initiative is on the right track.
“Getting Down to Facts” includes 22 studies by more than 30 researchers from the nation’s leading universities and research institutions. It was formally requested by a bipartisan group of state leaders, including Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Committee on Educational Excellence, Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, Senate President pro Tem Don Perata, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell and former Education Secretary Alan Bersin.
Two of these studies focus on the state of principal development and principal leadership for California’s public schools, one led by Linda Darling Hammond at Stanford; the other by Bruce Fuller at UC Berkeley (You can read both studies at http://irepp.stanford.edu/). As you will see, both are exciting validations for SFUSD’s leadership initiative, reinforcing our premise that that "principals are now regarded as central to the task of building schools that promote powerful teaching and learning for all students” and that "California's ambitious aspirations for raising student achievement and reducing the achievement gap require major systemic changes as well as investments in the knowledge and skills of teachers and leaders." (Hammond, 2007)
The Leadership Initiative is on the vanguard of addressing these problems; this new research validates our approach in “using competencies to guide our work, getting the basics right, increasing flexibility, rooting all work in instructional leadership, using data-driven decisions, and allocating resources more effectively.” (See Fuller study for more details).
Clearly, reforms in our leadership development systems and structures are absolutely crucial to ensuring that we close the achievement gap and raise student achievement for all students.
To view the full set of studies, visit http://irepp.stanford.edu/.
|
|
