How External Partners Can Help Advance Equity and Effective School Leadership

The Role of Partnerships in Supporting Equity-Centered School Leadership

This report examines how school districts and a set of external partners—state education agencies, universities, and community-based organizations—worked together to help develop equity-centered principals who effectively lead for all students.

The principal has a profound impact on a school—who teaches there, how well it runs, and what students experience.

Eight large urban districts have been working with state agencies, universities, and community groups to strengthen how they find, prepare, and support principals. A new study of the first four years of that effort shows what helped those partnerships work, as well as challenges encountered along the way.

“Partnerships are more likely to endure if they are mutually beneficial. Partners need to feel that their voices matter and their expertise is relevant,” according to the Wallace-funded study, produced by CALL-ECL, the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership Learning/Equity-Centered Leadership, which includes several research teams.

The eight districts are part of a multi-year, Wallace-supported initiative, the Equity Centered Pipeline Initiative (ECPI). This effort aims to support public schools with building sustainable principal pipelines designed to develop leaders who can move education systems toward ensuring all students have access to the opportunities and resources they need to realize their full potential.

The report, “The Role of Partnerships in Supporting Equity-Centered School Leadership,” draws on both qualitative and quantitative data collected from 2021-25. It identifies overall lessons for the field, as well as guidance to each specific type of partnership across the eight districts: Baltimore, Columbus (Ohio), the District of Columbia, Fresno, Jefferson County (Kentucky), Portland (Oregon), San Antonio, and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County.

For example, the study finds that:

District-state partnerships were especially vulnerable to turnover and reorganization at the state agency, and in some cases diminished dramatically in the fourth year.
Few community groups remained consistently engaged with district partners throughout the four years of data collection.
Collaboration between university partners and district leaders generally increased over time.

Read the full report.

See the report’s executive summary for a quick breakdown of recommendations for each type of partnership—state agencies, community groups, and universities. In addition, the report’s landing page provides a set of implementation tips drawn from the real-world experiences of participants.

Keep an eye out for more research and ideas coming out of ECPI in the coming months. Thanks as always for your interest.