Education and Urban Society

This essay summarizes the key themes of each article in this special issue of Education and Urban Society and addresses complimentary issues raised within the articles. Each article addresses an important issue facing school leaders—perennially low-performing schools, enacting instructional leadership in the face of accountability, the district's role in school improvement, and effective practices of instruction and assessment. Together they suggest that leading school improvement is more than the process of leading pedagogical adoptions, professional development, or making sound decisions. They also suggest that leading in low-performing schools requires sustained attention to both the people within the system and the context in which the system operates.

This article presents a collaborative inquiry analysis of the school improvement experiences of four persistently low-performing schools. It draws on the experiences of three members of the Laboratory for the Design and Redesign of Schools (LDRS) consortium who helped during their planning for restructuring or restructuring phases and one regional official who oversaw their grant support and school improvement interventions. The authors explore the role of organizational change to improved teaching and learning in the schools. The schools' mixed leadership and organizational capacity and belief in their teaching efficacy limited the benefits of state, district, and regional supports and resources, which school leaders were ill-equipped to coordinate. Combining leadership and organizational development with curricular and instructional reform models would be more promising.

Instructional leadership has long been advocated as a primary responsibility of principals. What is unclear, however, is the role that instructional leadership plays in the current high-stakes testing era in the daily work lives of principals, how they practice as instructional leaders, and toward what instructional outcomes they strive. This study focused on how principals understand the relationship between their daily work and the improvement of instruction in their schools. The study incorporates the voices of 20 principals. Multiple conceptions of instructional leadership are identified and problematic aspects of these conceptions are discussed.

This study focuses on an evaluation project that served as a powerful professional development experience for teachers and leaders in a network of Chicago small schools. The network of small schools led by the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative is based on the Authentic Intellectual Achievement (AIA) framework originally conceived by Fred Newmann. As teachers developed rubrics to measure AIA and scored teachers' assignments and student work collected from their own schools to establish baseline data on the schools' achievement on the AIA scales, they gained deeper understanding of the AIA framework, which served as the theory of instruction for the network of small schools. Participants' reactions to the impact of their involvement on their teaching practices are explored.

School and district effectiveness studies show that high levels of student achievement are possible when schools and the district act as coordinated units of change. There is also a growing recognition that principals cannot lead alone and that school leadership teams (SLTs) are essential to the improvement process. Limited studies have explored the mental models of central office, principals, and teachers who are members of SLTs. We hypothesize that when SLTs and the central office engage collaboratively in professional development about the tasks of leadership, shared mental models are more likely to develop. A case study methodology is used and multiple sources of data are analyzed through two theoretical lenses: tasks of leadership and mental models. Findings indicate a growing congruence between the district and SLTs' mental models regarding the tasks of leadership. This study is significant in showing that with professional development, SLTs could serve as an important bridge between the central office and the schools in ways that can enhance coordination, depth, spread, and commitment to district reforms.