About e-Lead
Partners
The role of the principal continues to expand. The new demands of state student-performance standards and testing; emerging knowledge of student learning and cognition; and research tying principal leadership to student achievement mean that principals can no longer be content to be effective building managers. Instead, they must also serve as leaders for student success. What does a leader for student success do? This administrator, simply put, places paramount value on student achievement. With that at the center, the principal aligns teaching, curriculum, building environment, parents and community around the goals for students' performance. This is no easy task.
In this current climate of education reform, school districts have begun to pay closer attention to the recruitment and development of the principals who lead their schools. These changes have taken the form of innovative and effective hiring and on-the-job practices; grooming people from within the ranks in the form of district-university partnerships; establishing academies to help certify and develop principals; and investigating the feasibility of re-training professionals from outside education.
Many, though, are struggling to devise effective school leadership development strategies in response to their unique challenges. e-Lead, a partnership between the Institute for Educational Leadership and Temple University's Laboratory for Student Success, was created -- with the help of an expert Advisory Board -- to ensure that all school districts have ready access to information about quality school-leadership-development strategies.
The Laboratory for Student Success (LSS) is one of 10 Regional Educational Laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Education to revitalize and reform educational practices in the service of student success. The LSS mission is to significantly improve the capacity of the mid-Atlantic region—which includes Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC—to enact and sustain lasting systemic educational reform by building on the resources and expertise of schools, families and communities in the region to improve student learning. Through its broad-based programs of applied research and development services to the field, LSS provides ongoing professional development and technical assistance to support efforts of local schools and state education agencies to achieve student success. The U.S. Department of Education designated LSS as the lead laboratory in the specialty area of educational leadership. Accordingly, LSS will address issues of procedural knowledge on what effective school leaders need to know to create an environment that support high-performing learning communities. In addition, LSS will advance the knowledge base through case studies and a program of intensive technical assistance and professional development support to states and schools.
The Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL) is a not-for-profit, non-partisan organization. Impartial and unconstrained by constituency, IEL was founded in 1964 on the belief that education is the responsibility of our schools, our communities and the institutions and organizations that support them. IEL's mission—to build the capacity of individuals in education and related fields to work together across policies, programs and sectors—is in support of one core purpose: to promote better results, therefore, better futures for all children and young people. In pursuit of its mission, IEL's work spans the key policy and practice environments that have an impact on children and young people and is broadly and deeply rooted in state and local connections, programs and networks. IEL recognizes that the pursuit of better education outcomes for all children requires a comprehensive and systemic approach to developing better leaders, strengthening school-family-community connections and connecting and improving the policies and systems that support children and youth. IEL's commitment to these program areas of work remains steady.