Effective schools research over the past 30 years has demonstrated that the leadership behaviors of boards, superintendents and key district leaders significantly impact student achievement. While much is known about how these behaviors correlate to student success, much more remains unknown, and the dimensions and demands of educational leadership continue to evolve.

In Building a New Structure for School Leadership, Richard Elmore states that education leaders are “being asked to assume responsibilities they are largely unequipped to assume, and the risks and consequences of failure are high for everyone, but especially high for children.” If public schools survive, he says, “leaders will look very different from the way they presently look, both in who leads and in what leaders do.”

Current knowledge and practices are not sufficient to accomplish a change of this magnitude. To transform educational leadership, we cannot merely align around or incrementally adjust what is known and practiced. Rather, today’s educational challenges require significant innovation in educational leadership knowledge and practice.

However, there is a paucity of knowledge about how to identify and lead the types of change in urban school systems that will produce significantly improved outcomes for underperforming students. This scarcity relates both to a lack of understanding of the school district as an integrated system and a lack of clarity regarding how leadership and instructional practices relate to accelerating the achievement of these students.

Anthony Bryk, Ph.D., the incoming president of The Carnegie Foundation, outlines this deficit in his paper Ruminations on Re-Inventing an R&D Capacity for Educational Improvement: “Educators are under tremendous pressure to help all students achieve at high levels. What historically we have asked for only a modest portion of students has now become a universal goal.

“In other sectors of society, leaders confronting such challenges would turn to their research and development communities for guidance … it is inconceivable that we can respond effectively to the demands for much better schools without also a serious transformation in the ways we develop and support school professionals, the tools, materials, ideas and evidence with which they work, and the instructional opportunities that we afford students for rigorous learning.”

The National Research Council also cites the insufficiency of educational research and development in the 1999 Strategic Plan for Education Research and Its Utilization: “One striking fact is that the complex world of education — unlike defense, health care or industrial production — does not rest on a strong research base. In no other field are personal experience and ideology so frequently relied on to make policy choices, and in no other field is the research base so inadequate and little used.”

We see opportunity in the growing recognition that a new R&D infrastructure is needed to support school improvement in the U.S. Opportunity also resides in an approach to research that is problem-centered and practice-based, in which education practitioners and researchers from a variety of disciplines are supported to interact, collaborate and learn from each other, and contribute to a gradually expanding knowledge base about schooling and its improvement.