Linking Leadership to Student Learning

Book excerpt: Linking Leadership to Student Learning Linking Leadership to Student Learning clearly shows how school leadership improves student achievement. The book is based on an ambitious five-year study on educational leadership that was sponsored by The Wallace Foundation. The authors studied 43 districts, across 9 states and 180 elementary, middle, and secondary schools. In this book, Kenneth Leithwood, Karen Seashore Louis, and their colleagues report on what they found. They examined leadership at each organizational level in the school system—classroom, school, district, community, and state. Their comprehensive approach to investigating school leadership offers a balanced understanding of how the structures within which leaders operate shape what they do. The results within will have significant implications for future policy and practice. Praise for Linking Leadership to Student Learning "Kenneth Leithwood and Karen Seashore Louis offer a seminal new contribution to the leadership field. They provide a rich and authoritative evidence base that demonstrates clearly just why school leadership is so important and how it promotes successful student learning." —PAMELA SAMMONS, Ph.D., Professor of Education, Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford "This ambitious, groundbreaking, and thought provoking treatment of the link between school leadership and student learning is a testament to the outstanding work of these exemplary scholars. This is a 'must read' for academics and practitioners alike." —MARTHA McCARTHY, President's Professor, Loyola Marymount University, and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus, Indiana University "The question is no longer whether school and district leader's impact student learning, but rather how they do it. The authors provide a convincing answer, one that recognizes the crucial interaction between leader and locality." —DANIEL L. DUKE, Professor of Educational Leadership, University of Virginia