UPDATE: The Educated Reporter: Ten Questions To Ask On School Leadership

The Educated Reporter: Ten Questions To Ask On School Leadership:


Covering School Leadership: Three Stories to Steal

In my prior post, we talked about “10 Questions to Ask” when writing about school leadership. This time I’m offering three stories to steal. For more on this issue, I recommend you check out “The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning,” a report which came out earlier this year from the Wallace Foundation. If you want to dig deeper into other aspects of school

by Emily Richmond / 3min 

Ten Questions To Ask On School Leadership

When I was covering the education beat in Las Vegas, an annual survey of teachers in the Clark County School District – the nation’s fifth-largest – always yielded plenty of fodder for stories. But what struck me in particular was the No. 1 reason – year in and year out - given by teachers when asked why they had decided to leave a school. It wasn’t overly challenging students, or low pay or a long commute. Rather, it was dissatisfaction with their principals.

Now let’s consider that anecdote as part of a larger context: How principals influence the quality of a school’s teacher workforce. We know that the quality of classroom instruction is the single largest in-school influence on student achievement. But recent research by the Wallace Foundation has found the second-place spot goes to school leadership.

There’s a clear link between effective campus leadership and effective teaching. But it’s one that doesn’t get explored often in education reporting. What if we viewed these elements as essential components that should overlap regularly, rather than parallel tracks?

To get a better idea of what reporters should be thinking about when they tackle the issue of school leadership, I reached out to someone who’s been doing particularly fine work on this issue: Lesli Maxwell of Education Week. I also reached out to some