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More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases, these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. We use longitudinal data from one large urban school district to study the relationship between principal turnover and school outcomes. We find that principal turnover is, on average, detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover of school leadership results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains. Leadership changes are particularly harmful for high poverty schools, low-achieving schools, and schools with many inexperienced teachers. These schools not only suffer from high rates of principal turnover but are also unable to attract experienced successors. The negative effect of leadership changes can be mitigated when vacancies are filled by individuals with prior experience leading other schools. However, the majority of new principals in high poverty and low-performing schools lack prior leadership experience and leave when more attractive positions become available in other schools.

More than a dozen school districts are taking part in a leadership fellowship sponsored by the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charter network, in order to learn how the network trains its school leaders. The KIPP Leadership Design Fellowship, which is funded through a $50 million federal Investing in Innovation grant, has also brought together representatives from charter management organizations and educator training programs.

Educators in public schools in the United States are typically enrolled in defined-benefit pension plans, which penalize across-plan mobility. We use administrative data from Missouri to examine how the mobility penalties affect the labor market for school leaders. We show that pension borders greatly affect leadership flows across schools  - for two groups of schools separated by a pension border, our estimates indicate that removing the border will increase leadership mobility between them by 97 to 163 percent. We consider the implications of the pension-induced rigidities in the leadership labor market for schools near pension borders in Missouri. Our findings are of general interest given that thousands of public schools operate near pension boundaries nationwide.

"For decades, principals have been recognized as important contributors to the effectiveness of schools. In an era of school accountability reform and shared decisionmaking and management in schools, leadership matters. Principals constitute the core of the leadership team in schools."

Public education is by necessity an extension of our political system, resulting in schools being reduced to vehicles for implementing political mandates. For example, during the past thirty years, education has become federalized through indirect ("A Nation at Risk" spurring state-based accountability systems) and direct (No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top) dynamics. As government policy and practice, bureaucracy is unavoidable, but the central flaw with the need for structure and hierarchy is that politics prefers leadership characteristics above expertise. No politician can possibly have the expertise and experience needed in all the many areas a leader must address (notably in roles such as governor and president). But during the accountability era in education over the past three decade, the direct role of governors and presidents related to education has increased dramatically-often with education as a central plank in the campaigns and administrations of governors and presidents. One distinct flaw in that development has been a trickle-down effect reaching from presidents and governors to state superintendents of education as well as school board chairs and members: People attaining leadership positions that form and implement education policy have no or very little experience or expertise as educators or scholars.

In the Republican Party, presidential debates candidates like Mitt Romney and Herman Cain tout their business executive experience and claim expertise at job creation. Former Governors Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman promote their management experience as the CEO of state governments. Whatever you may think of their proposals for stimulating the economy and ending unemployment, there is no question that these candidates believe, and they believe their audience believes, that knowledge and experience are important leadership qualities. However, when it comes to educational leadership, it seems that knowledge and experience do not count for very much, certainly not to the Obama-Duncan team, the Cuomo-King-Tisch team that establishes educational policy in New York State, or the Bloomberg-Walcott team that runs the schools in New York City.

The story in Atlanta is about race, gender, poverty, social class, and, of course, power. It's about fairness and integrity, about leadership and about failures of leadership, and it's also about social responsibility and the abdication of that responsibility.

For my very smart MIT student, Teach for America, would be a pit stop where she would pick up some leadership skills while teaching disadvantage children on her way to Chase, where she would use her finely honed mathematical and leadership skills in ways that almost certainly would not benefit the students she taught.

Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.

There is considerable variance in the productivity of teachers, yet educators have been unable to identify observable characteristics related to teacher effectiveness. This paper uses data from admissions records from Teach for America to explore whether information collected at the time of hire can predict student outcomes. We find that a teacher's prior achievement, leadership experience, and perseverance are associated with student gains in math. Leadership experience and commitment to the TFA mission are associated with gains in English. The TFA admissions measures are also associated with improved classroom behavior. These results suggest that teacher success can be predicted at the time of hire.

In this interview with Educational Leadership, Linda Darling-Hammond describes the kind of preparation and support new teachers need to survive their critical first years in the classroom.

I've said it before and taken heat for it, but I'll say it again: this is a result of straight up sexism. Christie never goes after the cops or the firefighters or even the CWA workers like he goes after teachers, and the reason is clear: he is comfortable verbally abusing women. He did it to Valerie Huttle and Loretta Weinberg and Marie Corfield without the slightest hesitation. Is it such a stretch to believe that he thinks that a profession with a majority of women is a profession that is full of bubble-heads that can be easily duped by their union?

South Carolina's Superintendent of Education Mick Zais makes several claims in The State (March 25, 2012) that build on one central argument: "The most important information about teachers isn't the degrees they have or their years of seniority. Their effectiveness in the classroom matters much, much more." Like Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Zais has no experience teaching children in K-12 public education. This complete lack of teaching experience and degrees in the field of education is a suspect position from which to claim that these two characteristics do not matter. In fact, political appointees and elected officials sit in unique positions often above both accountability (the mantra du jour of the political elite regarding education) and qualifications-unlike the real world markets they often praise.

Over the past decade, amazing research has been conducted in the area of school leadership. With the wealth of information out there, I often wish someone would take the best of it and put it into simple terms, describing exactly what it is that great principals do to significantly improve teaching and learning. The Wallace Foundation's recent Perspective, The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning, is a huge step forward in granting my wish. The report tells us that the most successful principals perform five key functions well

A residency program in Denver, and mentorship and leadership-development programs in Georgia's Gwinnett County school system are among the projects getting a financial injection over the next five years from a $75 million investment from the New York-based Wallace Foundation that is aimed at improving the pipeline leading to the principal's office.

So my question is this--how hypocritical is it that someone who does not meet the standards for teacher tenure would move toward educational leadership? Ought not our leaders be able to master the most basic and important job in education--teaching?

Barnett Berry is the President of The Center for Teaching Quality.  I am a member of one of its organizations, the Teacher Leaders Network.  About a month ago Barnett posted a piece titled Moving Past Excuses: What Excellence & Equity Require.  It was written in the aftermath of news about the cheating scandals in Atlanta and Washington DC, and several other things about education that hit the news in the same time frame. Barnett Berry has long been an advocate of a broader role for our more gifted and effective teachers, one where they could exercise leadership without having to leave the classroom.

I had a conversation with the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, in which we discussed how teachers can be proactive in engaging political debates about public-sector employees, and how teachers are showing leadership in strengthening our schools.

The Kansas City, Mo., school district, which was thrown into leadership turmoil late last month when Superintendent John Covington resigned abruptly to take a new position in Michigan, will have its accreditation revoked by the state in January.

While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what specific skills principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals confirms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.