<p>This report synthesizes what has been learned about how leaders in urban systems focus their leadership on the improvement of learning, and what it takes to support their leadership in these settings.
This report maps out activities and supporting conditions in states, districts, and schools, that enable educational leadership to exert productive influence on learning. The report draws together threads from the research literature and from practical experimentation in a variety of states, districts, and schools, as described in greater detail within six reports that comprise the Improving Leadership for Learning series.
This report addresses the complexity of problems associated with traditional comprehensive high schools. It examines why, despite repeated calls for reform, and various efforts aimed at reform, evidence suggests that what transpires for students inside the high school classroom remains relatively impervious to change. A picture of the terrain of leadership activity important for transforming high schools is proposed followed by questions of how the work of leadership might be accomplished.
Drawing from empirical studies and the landscape of current practice, this report explores ideas related to how educational leaders access data, the meanings they give to it, and the uses to which they put these data in the varying settings in which leaders seek to improve teaching and learning. Moving away from the potentially appealing rhetoric that data can provide clear, indisputable direction for future action (e.g. data-driven decision making), the notion of data-informed leadership captures the complex and often ambiguous nature of data use in educational settings.