Education Pioneers

If you had an extra hour in your workday, what could you do?
If you spent an hour with a coach, focusing on the most challenging parts of your job, how helpful would that be?

We seek to put an hour back into each school principal’s day – so that they can put that hour each day into one of the classrooms in their school.

For our public education system to prepare every child to thrive in college, career, and life, all classrooms must be led by excellent teachers who are consistently supported, developed, and coached by great principals.

Though responsible for supporting teachers’ professional growth and development, principals often face challenges that reduce their ability to support teachers: with the myriad responsibilities of running a school, and with budget cuts forcing staff reduction, many principals don’t have the time or the staff capacity they need to devote to this important work.

The idea to meet this challenge is simple. Connect great principals with some really sharp people - Education Pioneers Fellows - to work with them to ASSESS how they currently spend their time, REMOVE BARRIERS to using it effectively and REDESIGN their systems for managing their school so that they can FOCUS on what is critical: supporting the improvement of their teachers and the learning of their students.

In California, which ranks 49th in the country with regard to per pupil funding, both school districts and charter school organizations must operate with extremely limited resources. In districts, for example, budget cuts have reduced support staff, and an elementary school principal who may have previously had two coordinators and an assistant principal now functions as the sole school leader. While these cuts are necessary to preserve instructional programming, principals are confronted on a daily basis with urgent operational and management issues that can prevent them from getting into classrooms with their teachers.

Charter school leaders in California, who also operate with extremely limited resources, are tasked with taking on a range of entrepreneurial challenges that include building systems to support the effective management of their schools. With both district and charter schools, there is a tremendous amount of impact that can be gained by putting practices into place that keep principals out of operational minutiae and instead enable them to spend time with their students and teachers.

Providing key human capital support to both district and charter school leaders to help them redesign how they are managing their schools and free up their time to focus most on their teachers will have a tremendous impact on students. To transform the work of hundreds of principals across Los Angeles, this project will seek to:

1. Understand and improve how principals in multiple different school settings spend their time;
2. Develop, test and disseminate TOOLS that can be used by any of the more than 1000 school administrators across LA.

The end result is that principals will increase the effectiveness of their teachers through increased observation, coaching, feedback and collaboration and all students will benefit.