Instructional Leadership in the Era of No Child Left Behind: Perspectives from the United States

Abstract

Most large-scale urban school reform efforts of the last three decades in the United States have centered on providing incentives and sanctions for aligning educational practice to standards set at the district, state, or national level. Incentives typically have been provided for educators and schools to meet standards, and accountability has been enacted through various punitive sanctions when schools and educators have not met benchmarks or showed gains in outcome indicators. As pressure for improving student achievement in the current standards-based accountability environment continues to intensify and test results are scrutinized with unprecedented attention, school leaders are urged to focus their leadership efforts on the core purpose of schooling—teaching and learning (Kohn 2000). This chapter discusses the impact of assessment/standards-based reform on instructional leadership within the policy context of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB; Chrismer et al., Harvard Education Review 76(4):461–473, 2006; Supovitz, Developing communities of instructional practice, 2001; Supovitz and Poglino, Instructional leadership in a standards-based reform, 2001) and how leadership, not just by the principal but by a wider cast of individuals in both formal and informal leadership roles, plays a critical role in reinforcing instructional improvement and instructional quality that lead to accountability and improved student achievement.