Featured Projects
Below is a sampling of articles, books, briefs, reports, and tools we’ve developed and co-created — as consultants, staff, and community partners — to help nonprofit and school system leaders reach their goals.
We wrote an annual report that doubled as a ten-year retrospective on the RISE Network, drawing on the experiences of more than 35 brilliant minds across the national network of innovative high schools — including students, teachers, school counselors, Grade 9 on-track coaches and mentors, principals, assistant principals, superintendents, local and national philanthropic leaders, and longtime team members. Today, we continue to contribute to the organization's blog, covering the network's efforts to use data and continuous improvement practices to redesign the high school experience for young people and the educators who support their success.
We supported TNTP, a founding member of the One Million Teachers of Color Campaign, to develop a District Policy Brief, State Action Guide and a Federal Policy Brief, each of which focuses on creating more supportive conditions for teachers and school leaders of color to thrive.
We partnered with MCEL, a national educational leadership nonprofit, to create the Resilient, Representative Leadership™ Toolkit, and to elevate local efforts to support stronger, more diverse school leadership in trusted education trade outlets.
We co-developed a communications toolkit, staff engagement and training sessions, and brand guidance, resources, and templates for YouthForce NOLA, a local career-connected learning intermediary nonprofit. We also partnered on the development of the organization’s 2023 Annual Report, which exemplified the organization’s asset-based, values-driven message framework.
We led a project to connect research, policy, and practice around distributed leadership — the idea that schools work better when leadership is shared among principals, teachers, students, and parents rather than concentrated in one person at the top. Our primary goals were to ensure the research made it into the hands of educators working to build distributed leadership into their daily practice, and policymakers who needed a concrete, evidence-based case for investing in it.
We co-led a body of work examining the lack of systematic preparation for teacher leaders. The centerpiece of the Untapped series evaluated Emerging Leaders, a training model that embeds leadership practice directly into teachers' day-to-day work in schools. Our companion piece focused squarely on the principal's role in growing teacher leaders. We also partnered with a transformational school principal to craft a relatable, first-person account of why teacher leadership matters and what it looks like in practice.
We were brought into an important, multi-institutional research project to provide strategic guidance, subject matter expertise, and comprehensive support to keep the publication on track. We re-analyzed and re-interpreted focus group data using a research-backed leadership framework; conducted interviews with co-authors and local, state, and federal officials; led the entire editorial process, including developmental editing and structural revisions, design oversight, fact-checking, and copy-editing; and translated insights from educators of color into nuanced findings and actionable takeaways for the field.
We spearheaded a multi-year research and policy initiative on the new opportunities the Every Student Succeeds Acs (ESSA) created for states to invest in leadership. Our companion research focused on supporting strong state and local implementation, including via speeches, briefs, and articles — penned in partnership with practicing education leaders — that carried our findings and recommendations to broader audiences.
For example, we supported an accomplished educational leader to testify before the U.S. Senate, providing a principal’s perspective on how federal accountability provisions in ESSA can support the leaders of turnaround schools. When she joined our team as a senior policy fellow, we partnered to craft an op-ed on steps state officials can take to get a well-prepared, well-supported leader in every school.
We also contributed to New America's Painting the ESSA Canvas series, which invited policy experts to offer states "big ideas" for using new ESSA Title II-A flexibility to rethink educator quality. Our contributions focused on educator evaluation and support.
In addition, we partnered with All4Ed to develop easy-to-use primers, fact sheets, and explainers to support our organization’s network of school leaders to understand new ESSA provisions, and to take action in their local communities.
We partnered with a nonprofit executive to develop a research-backed article making the case that school turnaround isn't a matter of rare heroics and charisma, but a learnable, repeatable set of practices. We elevated a new policy opportunity — the Title II set-aside for school leadership, which our advocacy team helped secure in federal law — and offered specific recommendations for how state officials could use the funding source to develop principals capable of delivering breakthrough results.
We regularly partnered with our research and program colleagues to craft state and federal policy solutions focused on ensuring the right local conditions are in place to support principal leadership, including balanced autonomy between central offices and principals. In a high-stakes moment — the shift to more rigorous college- and career-ready standards — we outlined needed shifts in local, state, and federal policy to enable principals to practice a more intensive form of instructional leadership.
We served in the 100Kin10 Solution Lab that generated a practical guide for talking about the Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards. Our role was to ensure the messaging architecture and a library of ready-to-use sample content reflected the needs of principals and other school leaders, who held primary responsibility for communicating about the new standards and expectations with teachers, students, and parents/caregivers in their communities.
We contributed content and expertise to a 100Kin10 research brief on the catalytic investments and most promising, mutually reinforcing efforts to improve school work environments for teachers, in STEM fields and beyond.
We partnered with a chief executive officer to craft stories for an anthology documenting Illinois's landmark 2010 overhaul of principal preparation and licensure, which is widely cited as a national model for raising the bar on how principals are trained. Our contributions to Chapters 2 and 3 highlight the New Leaders-Chicago Public Schools partnership as one of the early district-provider models that provided evidence that better principal preparation was possible, among other topics.
