Evidence-Based Leadership

Educational Forum, The, Winter 2005 by Lewis, Jenny, Caldwell, Brian J

Many nations' governments are requiring schools to bring about significant, systematic, and sustained change to improve student outcomes in all settings, and have imposed mandates to ensure that schools are providing quality education and running efficiently and effectively. Consequently, national and state testing programs, standards-based agendas, and reporting methodologies have been imposed on schools with significant demands and, in many cases, demoralizing outcomes (Hargreaves 2003). As a result of these processes, test questions have become the curriculum; teacher judgment has become undervalued; and evidence that is ill-informed, outdated, and incorrect has been used to drive school change.

Many school leaders have responded in good faith to the growing demands for evidence, spending days and weeks gathering data in the hope that they will create sustainable learning plans for individual students and gain adequate funding to run school programs. There are, however, serious disconnects between what is taught and observed in the classroom, and what is collected, categorized, and reported by the school. Evidence about practice that is meant to inform and appease politicians and the public and the use of evidence in practice to improve teaching and learning quality rarely have been linked.

The most intelligent use of evidence is not after the event. Postmortems may establish the cause of death, but they cannot bring a corpse back to life. Yet, most uses of evidence in education-league tables, test scores, and school reports-have this after-the-fact characteristic. The challenge for leaders is to collect and report data and be able to internalize it at the right time for the right reasons for the right students.

How organizations use evidence is connected integrally to how they create and manage knowledge-the knowledge of how to share practice, how to transfer it between people, how to alter and improve it, and how to explain and account for it to others (Caldwell 2004; Drucker 1999; Hargreaves 2003). Evidence-based leadership links how evidence is used to how well the school operates and improves.

Principal Jenny Lewis at Noumea Primary School in Australia has identified and collected authentic and authoritative evidence and related it to learning as a means of improving organizational effectiveness and performance. As a result, Noumea staff members have become "skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights" (Garvin 1993, 16). The school community has built an evidence-based environment that promotes sustainability through innovative and informed Evidence-Based Leadership in Action-a reform that has become embedded in teachers' practices and the school's operations.

The Context for Evidence-Based Leadership

Noumea Primary is a large public school (580 students) in a low socioeconomic area west of Sydney in the state of New South Wales. The student population is transitional with 43 percent of the students leaving and enrolling each year and 62 percent being of Polynesian or indigenous descent. Many families are now third and fourth generation unemployed. School staff members continually change as the principal encourages them to seek promotions in other schools after five years of service at Noumea. Newly appointed teachers fill these openings, meaning that 83 percent of staff members always are in their first five years of teaching. Until ten years ago, Noumea was identified as a school at significant risk (DeLong and Fahey 2000; Garvin 1993). Since then, Noumea has rebuilt itself as a learning organization, basing its reforms on knowledge creation and sharing.

Noumea was included in the top 25 (out of 2,200) government and nongovernment schools in New South Wales for outstanding improvement in basic skills mathematics in 2000. It was awarded the 1999 National Assessment Award and the 2000 State Literacy Award for its innovative structures and programs. The school received the 2003 Australian Capital Territory Knowledge Management Platinum Award for school culture and technology development to enable organizational learning. At the national level, it received two 2003 National Quality Teaching Awards for leadership and achievement of mathematics outcomes through the use of technology. A nationally funded study dealing with literacy among boys (Alloway et al. 2002) found that teachers at Noumea used school and student data to design individual learning programs and developed innovative and exciting teaching tools to motivate their students to learn.

Evidence-Based Leadership in Action

Three concepts lie at the heart of Noumea's transformation: learning organization, knowledge management, and evidence-based leadership.

* Learning organizations (Britton 2002, 11) "actively incorporate the experience and knowledge of its members and partners through the development of practices, policies, procedures, and systems in ways which continuously improve its ability to set and achieve goals, satisfy stakeholders, develop its practice, value and develop its people, and achieve its mission with its constituency."