The Top and Bottom of Leadership and Change: Successful Large-Scale Reform Efforts-One in Northern England, Another in Canada-Bolster the Approach of "Leading from the Middle."

For 15 years and more, in the U.S., England, parts of Canada, and elsewhere, reforms to improve educational equity and achievement have come in large-scale measures--designed and delivered in detail by big government across whole systems. Such top-down reforms promised a sharp focus on improving literacy and mathematics achievement and boosting high school graduation. Training, coaching, and other professional development supports accompanied some top-down strategies. Others, like the No Child Left Behind law, proved excessively demanding, requiring progress for all categories of students every year and imposing punitive consequences when schools and districts fell short. But punitive or supportive, all top-down reforms have an Achilles heel: Their focus on micromanaging two or three measurable priorities only works for systems pursuing traditional and comparatively narrow achievement goals. A digital age of complex skills, cultural diversity, and high-speed change calls for more challenging educational goals and more sophisticated and flexible change strategies. Thus, reformers are advocating greater autonomy for schools and teachers, increased freedom for local curriculum design, and more independent and personalized access to technology. But the history of bottom-up innovation and individual school autonomy is not impressive. In the 1960s and '70s, innovative ideas often didn't spread beyond a few isolated classrooms and schools, and, when they did, their implementation often was fatally flawed (Gross, Giacquinta, & Bernstein, 1971). There is no reason to believe that efforts to spread the success of a few innovative, high-tech schools will fare any better today. In an age of innovation and diversity, top-down strategies are inappropriate, while bottom-up strategies seem unable to achieve improvement on any significant scale. So what should we do instead? One possibility is shifting attention toward districts, which can support schools and teachers in innovating and improving together. Leading in the middle In North America and Northern Europe, school districts have historically been the linchpin of local democracy (Katz, 1987; Bryk et al., 1998). California Gov. Jerry Brown has recognized this by returning education spending control back to the state's over 900 local districts, placing maximum control at the most local level of competent authority (Torlakson, 2015). Districts can provide a valuable focus for school improvement, be a means for efficient and effective use of research evidence and data analysis across schools, support schools in responding coherently to multiple external reform demands, and be champions for families and students, making sure everybody gets a fair deal. Strong districts are powerful forces for positive educational change (Leithwood, 2013). Strong and steadily improving districts like Boston Public Schools and Long Beach Public Schools have received widespread acclaim for systemwide gains (Barber, Chijioke, & Mourshed, 2011). In England, some of the most dramatic turnarounds have been in urban districts, like the London boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, which went from the lowest performers in the country to scoring above the national average on all key indicators (Hargreaves, Boyle, & Harris, 2014; Hargreaves & Shirley, 2009). So some reformers argue that the middle level needs a stronger role in order to implement changes from the top and to move around ideas and strategies percolating up (Schleicher, 2015). This amounts to a kind of leadership in the middle--a healthy sort of middle-stage spread. Weaknesses of the middle Leading in the middle is promising, but it's not enough. Not all local school systems or districts are strong. Some districts do well; others fare badly. Districts vary in their resources and capacities for change, like networking and seeking other ideas. Districts can be self-serving, politically toxic, glacially slow at driving improvement, and, as in the Atlanta cheating scandal, just plain corrupt. …

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