Leadership for School Improvement

During the past 20 years teacher leadership has become an estab-lished feature of educational reform in the United States. In the mid-1980s, arguments began to appear in the scholarly and professional lit-eratures asserting that teacher leadership was a crucial element of school improvement and the development and “professionalization ” of the teacher work force. To some observers, it would be impossible to improve schools, attract and retain talented teachers, or make sensible demands upon school administrators without promoting teacher lead-ership (e.g., Little, 1988; Wasley, 1991). To others, creating opportu-nities for teacher leadership was a moral imperative, to give teachers their professional due and to provide all children with the quality of education they deserve (e.g., Barth, 2001; Maeroff, 1988). It was not always seen this way. The planned change literature of the 1970s and early 1980s emphasized the importance of strong lead-ership for school improvement, but most of it focused on the principal or the superintendent (Fullan, 2001). More often than not, teachers were considered impediments to rather than leaders of improvement (Little, 1988). Even today, the subject of teacher leadership is cloaked in ambivalence. We look to teachers and their leadership to help solv