Leading a High Reliability School. Richard DuFour
during the Effective Schools movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1979, Ronald Edmonds first identified effective schools’ correlates in a seminal article titled “Effective Schools for the Urban Poor.” At the time, his list included six variables, one of which was strong administrative leadership. By 1982, Edmonds whittled down the variables to the five well-known effective schools’ correlates in a paper titled Programs of School Improvement: An Overview. In that paper, Edmonds (1982) notes that characteristics of an effective school include the following:
1. The leadership of the principal notable for substantial attention to the quality of instruction,
2. A pervasive and broadly understood instructional focus,
3. An orderly, safe climate conducive to teaching and learning,
4. Teacher behaviors that convey the expectation that all students are expected to obtain at least minimum mastery, and
5. The use of measures of pupil achievement as the basis for program evaluation. (p. 8)
Edmonds was certainly not the only researcher who recognized the importance of school leadership for student achievement during this era. Many others identified school leadership as an important variable as well, including George Weber (1971), Beverly Caffee Glenn and Taylor McLean (1981), and Wilbur B. Brookover (1979). Although a well-articulated definition of instructional leadership did not exist during the early days of the Effective Schools movement, effective schools researchers knew that it was a crucial ingredient. So, what goes into building effective school leaders? It turns out that they share many of the same characteristics.
Characteristics of Effective School Leaders
Since the initial work of Edmonds in 1979, the research community has continued to generate lists of effective school leaders’ characteristics. Remarkably, each update to the research base seems to reach the same conclusions on which school leadership factors (albeit named and described differently) impact student learning. In other words, as the research on school leadership expands, the same variables seem to rise to the top as most influential.
Robert Marzano, Timothy Waters, and Brian McNulty (2005) completed one of the early meta-analyses on school leadership. Following this came the largest and most comprehensive study on leadership practices, which influences student achievement to date: Investigating the Links to Improved Student Learning: Final Report of Research Findings (Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010). The Wallace Foundation commissioned this multiyear study, and researchers from the University of Minnesota and the University of Toronto ran the study. The findings suggest four general categories of leadership functions and sixteen leadership practices that influence student achievement (Louis et al., 2010). They include:
1. Setting directions
a. Building a shared vision
b. Fostering the acceptance of group goals
c. Creating high performance expectations
d. Communicating the direction
2. Developing people
a. Providing individualized support and consideration
b. Offering intellectual stimulation
c. Modeling appropriate values and practices
3. Redesigning the organization
a. Building collaborative cultures
b. Restructuring the organization to support collaboration
c. Building productive relationships with families and communities
d. Connecting the school to the wider community
4. Managing the instructional program
a. Staffing the program
b. Providing instructional support
c. Monitoring school activity
d. Buffering staff from distractions to their work
e. Aligning resources
In 2016, Dallas Hambrick Hitt and Pamela D. Tucker (2016) synthesized the research on leadership characteristics that impact student learning. Unlike some school leadership syntheses, Hitt and Tucker’s (2016) synthesis focuses only on peer-reviewed, empirical research. They identify three broad leadership frameworks that meet their criteria for inclusion and combine them into a new blended framework. The three frameworks are the Orlando Leadership Framework, the Learning Centered Leadership Framework, and the Essential Supports Framework. Through their synthesis, Hitt and Tucker (2016) have generated the following five domains that impact student achievement:
1. Establishing and conveying the vision
2. Facilitating a high-quality learning experience for students
3. Building professional capacity
4. Creating a supportive organization for learning
5. Connecting with external partners (p. 542)
In addition, they identify twenty-eight practices embedded in the five domains. These five domains and twenty-eight leadership practices further demonstrate the similarities in multiple researchers’ findings over many years (Brookover & Lezotte, 1979; Cotton, 2003; Deal & Kennedy, 1983; Donmoyer, 1985; Duke, 1982; Elmore, 2003; Fullan, 2001; Heifetz, 1994; Heifetz & Laurie, 2001; Leithwood, 1994; Sergiovanni, 2004; Youngs & King, 2002).
As mentioned previously, one striking thing about the history of research on school leadership is its relative consistency. One might say that as a profession, educators have developed a robust understanding of leadership factors in the research literature. Unfortunately, this enhanced knowledge has not turned into a coherent theory of action that enhances student achievement. We believe that to turn what we know about leadership into actionable knowledge, one must take a high reliability perspective.
A High Reliability Perspective
The concept of high reliability organizations has come up in the general literature for quite some time. For example, in the mid-1980s, the University of California, Berkeley launched a project known as the High Reliability Organizations Project. The Berkeley group set out to study high-hazard organizations that avoided failures and maintained success over time better than their peers in the same industries. In a paper titled The Legacy of the Theory of High Reliability Organizations: An Ethnographic Endeavor, Mathilde Bourrier (2011), among a number of inferences, concludes that high reliability organizations have a laser focus on using data to make decisions that themselves focus on continuous improvement. Another critical characteristic of high reliability organizations is awareness of the highly interdependent systems that characterize the daily operations of the organization. Bourrier (2011) states:
The HRS literature substantiated that safety and reliability are not only the result of great technology in combination with great culture. They are also the result of organization design: choices and allocations are made which greatly influence the potential to be safe and reliable. These decisions have to be questioned and reflected upon constantly. (p. 4)
Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe (2007) report similar findings from analyzing the literature on high reliability organizations.
While the initial literature and research on high reliability organizations focused on high-hazard industries, the concept of high reliability organizations has continued to evolve and now has visibility in the literature of professional industries such as health care, oil and gas, transportation, and international commerce. In 2014, worldwide consulting group North Highland produced a paper on the concept, reporting that “organizations that conduct consistent, sustainable, and low-error operations [are] based on informed, high-quality decision making and controls” (p. 2). North Highland (2014) identifies five aspects of operation that a high reliability organization practices:
• Organize its efforts to increase the amount and quality of attention to failure and data analysis.
• Engage every member