Leadership Programs

The third edition of the Leadership Connection Rubric was developed amidst the increasingly polarized national context that has challenged our conception of equitable schooling and threatened our democracy. Holding steadfast to our commitment to preparing, inducting, and supporting inclusive, justice-oriented school leaders, in this edition, we aim to respond to the current climate that leaders must traverse. As our students and alumni grappled with crises at the site and systems levels, upheavals from the COVID pandemic, and reckonings around racial justice, we found ourselves testing the strength of our conceptual frameworks for social justice leadership. What does it mean to lead in this context? What skills and dispositions are needed for the current and future education landscape? Rather than returning to “normal” operations, the current context requires leaders who are savvy about local and national political tensions and strategic in their approach to creating a more just future for the students, families, and communities they serve. This edition presents a more complex and nuanced approach to social justice leadership that serves as a call to action for aspiring and veteran leaders alike to use their positional authority in service of improving equitable outcomes for all students while disrupting the system’s tendency to replicate historical inequities. The Third Edition The third edition benefits from our work over nine years in the Berkeley School of Education’s Principal Leadership Institute and Leadership Support Program, as well as with the Leaders for Equity and Democracy EdD program and 21CSLA (21st Century California School Leadership Academy). This edition contains more inclusive language, a recognition of white supremacy, an awareness of the current political climate, and a call for leaders to attend to the social-emotional developmental needs of children and adults. In addition, the third version of the Rubric references concepts such as anti-racist leadership, the social construction of race, and the impact of bias and microaggressions on school culture and climate.

While California is not the only state with an ambitious universal preschool policy, its UTK policy is the most recent effort and has the opportunity to benefit from the early work in other states such as Illinois, Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. How have other state level leaders prepared principals to implement universal preschool? What can California learn from these experiences as UTK is implemented by 2026? What kinds of partnerships have contributed to success?

Researchers have turned attention toward principal turnover and its impact, especially in hard-to-staff schools. For example, the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the Learning Policy Institute recently issued a report indicating that nearly one in five principals leave their position every year (Levin, Bradley, & Scott, 2019). To inform the issue with the perspective of practicing principals, the Principal Leadership Institutes at UC Berkeley and UCLA, with support from the Stuart Foundation, launched a state-wide initiative entitled the Change Maker project, to support the well-being and improve retention of alumni principals. Change Makers includes a small cohort-based model of professional learning that focuses on reflection, networking, and content related to understanding well-being. Then in June 2020, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the project developed a first-of-its-kind survey focused on what erodes and supports the resilience of school leaders. Items and questions were informed by the content from the first year and a half of the project. With nearly 200 responses, survey results indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic has magnified stressors and increased overall stress levels for principals across demographic groups. Interestingly, principals employed in their current district for three to five years reported significantly higher changes in stress compared to those who were employed for one to two years in their current district. Leaders of color and multilingual leaders reported higher levels of stress before and during the pandemic compared to their White and monolingual counterparts. When seeking support, principals turn to peers and colleagues, mentors, and friends more frequently than supervisors and other options. Length of tenure appears to correlate with higher feelings of connectedness to school site/district as well as higher levels of feelings of efficacy. However, responses suggest that high school–level principals with enrollments of 1000 and higher experience feelings of lower self-efficacy. The Principal Resilience Survey suggests that the experience of stress and burnout, as well as effective support strategies, are areas where critical investigation is needed in order to address the broader issues of leader attrition and retention.

School leaders play a critical role in setting the conditions, providing ongoing support, and modeling a learner stance in order to optimize teacher professional development and peer coaching and mentoring initiative in Santiago, Chile offers a unique opportunity to deepen our understanding about the role leaders playin supporting, sustaining, and scalingprofessional learning for teachers. In 2017, the Principal Leadership Institute, one of the Leadership Programs of the Graduate School of Education, entered a two-year partnership with Centro de Desarrollo de Liderazgo Educativo (CEDLE) at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile to design one of the first peer mentoring and coaching initiatives in the country. During the pilot year, the Pedagogical Mentoring program was implemented in five schools with 15 mentorteachers and leaders. Because Pedagogical Mentoring was a new method of professional development for the Chilean schools that participated in the project, we can learn a great novice perspectives about what it takes to develop a sustainable model of peer mentorship and about the power and potential of peer coaching to support school improvement efforts. Our analysis confirms that school leaders, including principals and teacher-leaders, contributed greatly to the successful implementation of this initiative as well as the reciprocal learning for all participants. Although peer mentoring and instructional coaching are not new concepts in the United States, our work can be informed by focusing on the role of leaders in executing these professional development efforts. This investigation of the specific leadership actions carried out by Chilean educators in an early attempt to implement Pedagogical Mentoring provides a new lens through which to understand the conditions necessary to foster a successful coaching model in the United States that is designed for long-term, sustainable impact.

Research supports the urgent need to describe, document, and research innovative praxis in the field in order to assess and improve educational leadership preparation at the state and national levels, particularly given existing shortages of highly qualified principals and superintendents and the complex demands of leading school reform efforts. Moreover, leadership preparation that specifically supports the development of social justice- and equity-minded leaders are in need. Without frameworks, investigation and documentation are difficult to accomplish, as the conditions, resources, and pedagogical strategies necessary cannot be articulated in a holistic way that can help more leadership preparation programs explore new ways to look in the mirror in order to improve their programs. For over 20 years, the Berkeley Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) has been innovating new strategies and methodologies in its approach to leadership preparation by engaging with practicing artists, incorporating creative and culturally-based teaching strategies, designing performance assessment events, forming partnerships with arts education organizations, using and applying research on creative and arts-based pedagogy, and networking with other educator preparation programs. This report highlights the impact of a pedagogy integrating performative modalities into social justice leadership preparation across four domains of praxis: Identity & Vision, Model, Conditions, and Reflect. Furthermore, this impact brief highlights some of the powerful learning experiences that provided transformational learning for aspiring leaders who have gone through our program. Finally, we give a basic overview of the PLI Social Justice Leadership Preparation Landscape and how leadership preparation programs can visualize the conditions, resources, standards, and infrastructure needed to support this work. A fully elaborated version of this work is available here. Finally, we would be remiss not to acknowledge the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence during the time of publication. In the last month, all public schools and universities in California have sharply pivoted from largely in-person experiences to distance learning. While it is too early to assess the full impact, the work we describe in this Impact Report continues to serve as a strong foundation, even in this new reality.

This framework lays the foundation for integrating performative modalities in social justice leadership preparation as a strategy for teaching future leaders how to understand and address the conditions necessary for truly transformative teaching and learning in schools. It is situated at the intersection of several theoretical and contextual spaces within social justice leadership, leadership preparation, and the defunding of the arts in California. Through systematic engagement across these three spaces, a distinct and novel approach at the UC Berkeley Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) has emerged and is receiving increased recognition. This document is an attempt to describe and frame PLI’s integration of performative modalities through conceptual frameworks and living examples. We lay this foundation to memorialize all of the efforts to date with full expectation that our work will continue to be refined, shaped, and influenced in the future.

In 1999, as a response to teacher and principal shortages across the state, Governor Davis and the California Legislature man- dated the creation of Principal Leadership Institutes at UC Berkeley and UCLA. The Principal Leadership Institutes were part of Gov. Gray Davis’ education initiatives that were enacted soon after he took office in 1999. In a written statement, California Education Secretary Gary Hart noted that by proposing the institutes, “Gov. Davis hopes to offer world-class management training to school principals in order to help them create more successful schools.” Assembly Bill ABX1 of 1999 earmarked new funding for the University of California to provide scholarships for outstanding students committed to making a difference in hard-to-staff schools. This funding has created a virtuous cycle, enabling many young people from low-income and working class communities to return to their neighborhoods as highly trained teachers and school administrators. Re-authorized as the President’s Educator Fellowship in 2016, these dedicated scholarship funds help teachers with significant financial need to participate in UC’s top-flight Principal Leadership Institute programs. “These fellowships will help promising UC-prepared educators focus on becoming the exceptional teachers and principals that California youth deserve,” said UC President Janet Napolitano. “It’s a wise investment in the next-generation teachers and principals who will spark young imaginations and get students on a path toward college.” “Financial hardship shouldn’t hold any student back from joining UC’s signature educator preparation programs,” adds UC Provost and UCLA Professor Emeritus Aimée Dorr. “These fellowships help students participating in programs known for their commitment to and success in preparing outstanding educators for young Californians.” Over the next 20 years, more than 1300 graduates of the PLI program are in leadership roles at schools serving vulnerable and historically underserved youth, primarily in the Los Angeles Basin and greater San Francisco Bay Area. PLI graduates at both UCB and UCLA are highly recognized, well-prepared, diverse, and strongly committed to serving in leadership roles in high-need, urban schools. In 2014, the two sister programs initiated an unprecedented partnership between the campuses to create a statewide model for early career leader induction. The Leadership Support Program has supported over 300 PLI alumni and non-alumni leaders in California to earn the Professional Clear Administrative Services Credential or full administrative licensure. In the last five years alone (2014–2019), LSP participants worked in over 50 districts or local educational agencies in California.

The Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) at the University of California has focused on preparing and supporting a diverse group of equity focused educational leaders in the Bay Area since 1999. In 2004, PLI took on the work of leader induction and launched the Leadership Support Program (LSP), a voluntary three year program that was geared toward supporting early career leaders through an innovative model of professional learning activities, guided mastery and coaching. In 2015, LSP was expanded into Southern California through a partnership between UC Berkeley and UCLA. This move coincided with a shift in California State policy to mandate induction for educational leaders to obtain licensure. Now a state mandated two year program, this next iteration of LSP as a dual pathway program has continued to be on the forefront of leader induction practice, both in terms of results and innovations in the field. The impacts of the Leadership Support Program are illustrated by the hundreds of LSP graduates who continue to work in education at a rate which far surpasses the national average of educational leadership turnover. Analysis of LSP’s graduation and placement data as well as a close reading of student journals, assignments and testimonials reveals the program’s beneficial impact on leader retention and efficacy. This impact report is adapted from a longer and more thorough overview of LSPand highlights the background of the program, general operating principles and mechanics as well as an abbreviated summary of its impacts.

Founded in 1999, the Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) at the University of California, Berkeley, has three areas of work: aspiring leader preparation, early career leader induction, and professional learning support of a diverse community of equity focused leaders who will improve education for vulnerable and historically underserved students in California. Fifteen years ago, Berkeley PLI began the practice of leader induction as an innovative model for early career support. Originally designed as an invitational and voluntary continuation of the preparation program, the current mission of PLI’s Leadership Support Program (LSP), is to induct a diverse community of equity focused school leaders who will improve education for vulnerable and historically underserved students in California’s public schools in support of social justice. In total, LSP has inducted over 300 leaders in California to earn the Professional Clear Administrative Services Credential or full administrative licensure. In the last five years alone (2014-2019), LSP participants worked in over 50 districts or local educational agencies in California. The pioneering work of Berkeley PLI positioned the program to anticipate and support the implementation of a key new policy that mandated leader induction for all new administrators in California. Specifically, in 2014, the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC), an agency in the Executive Branch of California State Government that serves as a state standards board for educator preparation for the public schools of California, approved dramatic shifts in licensure for school leaders in the state by mandating a two-year leader induction program as the single pathway to obtaining full administrative licensure. This was a radical departure from the prior requirements that were more flexible and less time consuming. The purpose of this new policy was to address important concerns posed by then State Superintendent of Instruction Tom Torlakson who stated in his report Greatness by Design that “With its pioneering [Beginning Teacher Support and Assessment] program, California has been a national leader in developing mentoring programs for beginning teachers. In its early years, this program was shown to reduce attrition and improve teacher competence... [yet] in comparison to other states, California has lagged in supporting school leaders (p.42).”

Social justice school leaders can amplify the voices and activism of marginalized students by shifting from hierarchical relationships to working as allies. An ally is commonly defined as a person who is associated with another or others for some common cause or purpose. By transferring Kendall’s (2013) concept of “allyship” from racial privilege to leadership, this paper applies this theory through three dimensions: developing a radar, breaking ranks and creating space for student voice, and making intentional strategic moves. Ultimately, the school leaders highlighted in this study are tipping the balance to disrupt hierarchical relationships between leaders and students, in service of marginalized students.