Evidence - Based Leadership

Many nations’ governments are requiring schools to bring about significant, systematic, and sustained change to improve student outcomes in all settings, and have imposed mandates to ensure that schools are providing quality education and running efficiently and effectively. Consequently, national and state testing programs, standards-based agendas, and reporting methodologies have been imposed on schools with significant demands and, in many cases, demoralizing outcomes (Hargreaves 2003). As a result of these processes, test questions have become the curriculum; teacher judgment has become undervalued; and evidence that is ill-informed, outdated, and incorrect has been used to drive school change.