New Leaders

Great leaders = Great schools TM

WHY DOES LEADERSHIP MATTER?

Leadership is critical to transforming a school and raising student achievement. It's the adults who make the biggest difference to a school's success.

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"Being afforded this [New Leader] network pushes me to continue to learn, grow, and improve, and this has shaped me as a leader." David Kovach, Cohort 5, Chicago

Goals

New Leaders was founded to ensure high academic achievement for all children, especially students in poverty and students of color, by developing and supporting transformational school leaders. Below are three high-level goals that are top priorities for the organization.  We regularly assess how we are doing against these goals and make adjustments to move closer to attaining them.  Our first and most important goal is about dramatically improving the academic outcomes – and, ultimately, life prospects – of the students we serve. This goal shapes everything we do and drives all of our other goals.

Breakthrough Gains

Connected to our vision of ensuring college readiness for every student, our highest priority goal is for New Leader Principals to drive breakthrough gains in their schools – in other words, to make dramatic improvements in the achievement of their students. We measure this by tracking student performance on grade-level proficiency tests, looking at the rate at which scores are improving and whether a school is on track for 90+ percent of its students to reach proficiency within five years of a New Leader Principal taking over the helm of a school.

Broader impact

Based on over 10 years of experience and an extensive knowledge base about the qualities of successful leaders and schools, New Leaders aims to influence key decision-makers and public policies in order to drive educational excellence at scale. Through the Leadership Services we provide to system partners and our thought leadership activities in the form of speaking engagements and publications, we work to bring about the system-level policies and practices that support leaders in transforming schools and student outcomes in communities across the country.

Organizational effectiveness

In all of our work, New Leaders seeks to increase the internal capability and effectiveness of our organization in order to drive even greater student success. We are committed to engaging in continuous improvement processes and to leveraging our human and financial resources in strategic ways in order to have the greatest impact possible as an organization.