Breakthrough leadership : six principles guiding schools where inequity is not an option / Alan M. Blankstein, Marcus J. Newsome with Lauren B. Mahan ; foreword by Pedro A. Noguera.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

FOREWORD BY PEDRO A. NOGUERA

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Chapter 1. Out of the Crisis

Chapter 2. Breakthrough Leadership

Chapter 3. The First Hundred Days: A Pandemic Reentry Plan

Chapter 4. Relational Trust as a Foundation for the Equitable Learning Community

Chapter 5. Principle 1—The Pillars of an Equitable Learning Community: Mission, Vision, Values, and Goals

Chapter 6. Principle 2—Ensuring Achievement for All Students: Comprehensive Systems for Prevention and Intervention

Chapter 7. Principle 3—Data-Based Decision Making for Continuous Improvement

Chapter 8. Principle 4—Collaborative Teaming Focused on Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessments

Chapter 9. Principle 5—Meaningful Engagement With Families and Community

Chapter 10. Principle 6—Building Sustainable Leadership Capacity

INDEX

Now is the time for Breakthrough Leadership

This book was borne out of urgency. We face the consequences of a raging pandemic, coupled with an unprecedented call to end racial injustice. COVID-19 has exposed longstanding structural inequities, while at the same time offering a rare “breakthrough” opportunity to dismantle inequitable systems that have harmed our most marginalized students for generations.

Breakthrough Leadership is rooted in moral courage and calls us to act upon a new discovery, or epiphany about a fundamental truth that challenges previous beliefs.

While this book offers examples of schools that were “beating the odds” pre-COVID-19 as well as strategies for changing those odds in the future. Breakthrough Leadership also spotlights professionals now leveraging crises like this to shape local and national priorities toward a more equitable and healthy society for our children in order to:

Create and sustain Equitable Learning Communities (ELCs) that are grounded in relational trust
Establish comprehensive systems to ensure that all students thrive
Implement cutting-edge principles of effective curriculum, instruction, and assessment including culturally responsive teaching, trauma-informed practice, and blended learning
Meaningfully engage families and community
Leadership from the classroom to the board room is needed to advance an agenda of equitable and successful outcomes for our students. The facts stakes couldn’t be starker. Good leadership saves lives both in pandemics, and in our profession.


“The critical variable that determines whether or not our schools can respond adequately to the numerous challenges that they and their children face is leadership. . . This book is about the work of such leaders. In big cities, small towns, and rural areas, a small number of principals and superintendents are showing that progress can be made when leaders have the resourcefulness and courage to address equity challenges directly.

The educational leaders profiled in this book have a clear sense of how to systematically build the capacity of teachers and schools to meet the needs of the students they serve.I urge other leaders to learn from them so that great schools that serve all children well, will be the norm, rather than the exception.”

~Pedro Noguera


"With all its devastation, COVID-19 also presents the opportunity of the century to transform the public education system that, to say the least, has become stalled and stagnant in the past 50 years.. . . Breakthrough Leadershipmakes a significant contributionto our next phase, which must be one of definable and targeted transformation of equity-based learning.