Breakthrough Leadership: Six Principles Guiding Schools Where Inequity Is Not an Option

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 Noguero

 

"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 Leadership makes a significant contribution to our next phase, which must be one of definable and targeted transformation of equity-based learning.

~Michael Fullan

Award-winning author and educational leader, Alan Blankstein served for 25 years as President of the HOPE Foundation, which he founded and whose honorary chair is Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. A former “high-risk” youth, Alan began his career in education as a music teacher. He worked for Phi Delta Kappa, March of Dimes, and Solution Tree, which he founded in 1987 and directed for 12 years while launching Professional Learning Communities beginning in the late 1980s. He is the author of the best-selling book Failure Is Not an Option®: Six Principles That Guide Student Achievement in High-Performing Schools, which received the Book of the Year award from Learning Forward. Alan is Senior Editor, lead contributor, and/or author of 18 books, including Excellence Through Equity with Pedro Noguera,.  He also authored some 20 articles in leading education print including Education Week, Educational Leadership, The Principal, and Executive Educator. Alan has provided keynote presentations and workshops for virtually every major U.S. Ed Org, and throughout the UK, Africa, and the Middle East.  Alan has served on the Harvard International Principals Centers advisory board, and the Jewish Child Care Agency, where he once was a youth in residence.

Marcus J. Newsome is the director of the Virginia Superintendents Leadership Academy. Previously he served for 16 years as an award-winning school superintendent in Newport News, Chesterfield County and Petersburg City (Virginia). In 2015 his work was recognized by the U.S. Office of Educational Technology during a White House ceremony as a leader in transforming schools from a print to a digital learning environment. He has served as a consultant to governors, members of congress, and both national and international business leaders on solutions for closing achievement gaps, narrowing the digital divide, assessment design, professional development, and 21^st century teaching and learning. Newsome has earned doctorate degrees in educational leadership and religious education. He began his career as an art and mathematics teacher in the District of Columbia, and later served as a curriculum writer, principal, and district administrator. He has also served as an associate professor for several universities, including Harvard University and Virginia Commonwealth University. An ordained minister, and dedicated husband and father, he has dedicated his career to the service of children.