Welcome to the Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform!

The Schlechty Center for Leadership in School Reform is an organization that provides high-quality and responsive support to those who are leading school reform efforts across the nation. The Center’s staff primarily works with public school leaders to transform schools from organizations that produce compliance and attendance to organizations that nurture attention and commitment at all levels in the system.

What's New

The Fife School District outside of Tacoma, Washington, has over the past 10 years realized dramatic changes from the classroom to the board room. In Changing the Quality of Student Experiences: The Fife Way, the Schlechty Center chronicles the nature of these changes with special attention to how all changes are connected to students and the experiences the district provides them. Readers of this document may also want to learn more about the Schlechty Center's Six Critical Systems and our Theory of Change.

The Schlechty Center is committed to working with school leaders to focus their districts on student engagement. This article highlights Trussville City Schools’ effort to develop a teacher force that is committed to student-centered, technology-infused learning. Trussville is a member of the Schlechty Center’s Standard-Bearer School District Network and Suzanne Freeman, the district’s superintendent, is also a member of our Superintendents Leadership Network.

While teacher associations and other labor unions in school districts are too often cited as stumbling blocks to educational reform and, more often, accused of being at the root of education’s problems, one school district in northeastern Ohio negotiated and settled three contracts in a short time and with unprecedented goodwill during the spring and early summer of 2005. Lennie Hay documented the process in this article – Transforming Roles and Relationships: One District’s Choice to Pursue Greatness.

Looking for research on student engagement? A teacher from one of our client districts, Betty Bowen of Forsyth County, GA, published a literature review titled Student Engagement and Its Relation to Quality Work Design: A Review of the Literature in Volume 2 No. 1 of Action Research Exchange (ARE) sponsored by Valdosta University. You can also find a summary of the action research she conducted with other North Forsyth Middle School teachers.