5.3. Distributed Leadership

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Distributed leadership has its own structure and definition, albeit similar to SBM in its foundation of using data to drive instruction, incorporating high degrees of collaboration, being strategic, and making decision a shared experience. Leadership is distributed to teams or groups based on the idea that the complexity of school organizations are beyond what the principal—or a given single person—can reasonably, effectively, and/or or optimally handle. Elmore (2000) has led the way in discussing how and why leadership can be undertaken in diverse contexts.

One of the largest distributed leadership projects was originally funded by a $5 million dollar grant from the Annenberg Foundation to the Penn Center for Educational Leadership in 2005. It targeted 16 Philadelphia schools to improve teaching and learning though a distributed leadership intervention initiative. Measured success in the Philadelphia public schools was followed up by a request for a four-year, 3.4 million dollar distributed leadership initiative in 19 Archdiocesan Philadelphia schools (DeFlaminis, 2009, 2011, and 2013). The Philadelphia Distributed Leadership Initiative contains 13 curriculum models and 77 hours of leadership training.

The Philadelphia Distributed Leadership Project has captured the attention of other school districts and its successes offer another level of hope and promise to financially, academically, and politically distressed districts. This multi-year project is research- and evidenced-based; in addition, it is supported by highly experienced practitioners and researchers. It is my hope that it will rescue school systems that otherwise don’t have the capacity to do so alone. Working in isolation isn’t only a problem with individual teachers in their respective classrooms, it can also be a problem for an entire district. Collaboration and shared decision-making can build system capacity, not just teacher and principal capacity.