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The challenges of America鈥檚 education system are reaching crisis levels, and districts need to think differently about school leadership structure as part of the solution, according to a new book by school leadership consultant Lindsay Whorton.

In , Whorton, president of the Texas nonprofit , argues that the traditional framework of principal, assistant principal and teacher no longer works, as educators are forced to handle increasing demands and responsibilities. Instead, she proposes a four-level leadership model: a school leader who sets the school鈥檚 vision, long-term priorities and strategies for continuous improvement instead of “coaching teachers and constantly fighting fires”; bridge leaders 鈥� 鈥渢he glue of the school鈥� 鈥� who coach and mentor team leaders, communicate with the school leader and manage building initiatives; team leaders, who are directly responsible for developing and supporting team members, and the team members themselves, who include teachers, librarians, custodians and paraprofessionals. 

Many districts, Whorton says, run into problems when school leaders take on tasks that should be performed by people lower down on the organizational chart. Her proposed structure creates a clear hierarchy and, she says, cuts down on inefficiency and mismanagement. The book explains how districts can implement the four leadership levels effectively and provides examples of schools that have successfully done so, including Lockhart Independent School District near Austin, Texas. She spoke recently with 蜜桃影视鈥檚 Lauren Wagner.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

When did you begin working on this book, and what inspired you to write it?

I have been working on this book for over three years. I had this realization that, in many ways, we’ve just added more and more to a lot of the jobs that exist in school. That’s true for the principal, it’s true for teachers, and [we鈥檙e] sending this message that if you just work harder and are more skilled, that alone will be enough to meet the challenge that exists in this role. In addition to helping people build the skills that they need, we need to make sure that these jobs are designed in a way that sets them up to succeed. 

Your book presents four levels of leadership. Why is it important to have all four?

The basic idea of the four-level model is that you need enough leadership capacity to do two basic tasks: How do you build the capacity of people, and then how do you deliver results? If you look just at building capacity, the challenge is, you’ve got a principal who thinks that they’re responsible for the development of 40 teachers, and that is a really big task. 

You need a lot more leadership capacity to give teachers the support they need. That is what we call the team leader level, and those are people whose job is primarily to build the capacity of classroom teachers and the staff who work with students. But in a really big school, you [might] have 10 or 12 or 14 team leaders and the principal still has a lot of responsibilities leading the school. And so that argues that you need another layer, which is what we call a bridge leader level, who’s responsible for developing those team leaders. One of the bridge leaders鈥� key responsibilities is coaching and developing those team leaders and making sure that you’ve got a consistent instructional vision. You’re checking to say, “Do we hold a similarly high bar for the students in all of our grades and all of our subjects?” When you don’t have team leaders and bridge leaders, what you have are principals and assistant principals who are stretched way too thin trying to get to every teacher and are not able to do the work of being future-focused and leading the school. And you have a bunch of teachers who are not getting the coaching, the support, the development that they need. And I think we see that showing up in teacher turnover across the country.

Have school districts always lacked an efficient leadership structure like the one you describe in your book?

The structure of school leadership overall has changed very little in the last 50 years. But the expectations and the demands on leadership have changed dramatically. Prior to No Child Left Behind in 2001, the role of the principal was building manager. It was less focused on being in teachers’ classrooms and driving instructional practice. There was a big shift post-2001 to make principals more responsible for the work of instructional leadership. To be clear, the idea that a principal should be an expert in instruction and should be responsible for the outcomes of a school is a great thing, but as we made that shift, we’ve added a lot more expectations to what school leaders and administrators should be doing, without creating more leadership capacity or taking anything off their plate. 

You could tell the same story at the teacher level. The shift that we’re seeing with the teaching profession has been playing out since COVID, but if you go back to the recession in 2009, that鈥檚 when you started seeing a change in young people’s interest in getting education degrees. I think [it鈥檚] the new wave of pressure that’s going to hit school leadership structures, because we need to get back to a place where people want to be teachers. But in the meantime, we have a teaching profession that’s pretty inexperienced and didn’t get the kind of training and support before they entered the classroom that we might have wanted. And we have to make sure school leadership structures are built to give those folks the support that they need to become great and to stay in the profession.

Much of your book is centered around how to help districts implement the four-level leadership framework. How would a district dealing with a severe staff shortage move forward?

I’ve been feeling kind of anxious about how challenging financial conditions are for many schools and districts, and whether that would feel like a big barrier to trying to do work like this. When we talk about staffing shortages, we sometimes mean one of two different things. One is a lot of districts that may not have the funds to sustain all the positions that they’ve had in the past. And that’s where a lot of districts and schools are already trying to think creatively about, “How do we better utilize the positions that we have?” I do think this framework, this book, can be a resource for them. The other form of staffing shortages are folks who are struggling to find enough teachers to fill all the classrooms that they have. And I would argue this is where class sizes do come into play. Slightly bigger class sizes do reduce the number of teachers you need in order to have the strongest teachers that you can have, because you reduce that demand and are able to invest in things like time for those teachers to develop coaching and support.

How long might it take the average district to transform its leadership structure?

The answer will depend a little bit on the size of the district. But to get things right and for them to stick, people need to be a part of the change. So spending time on the front end 鈥� getting clear on what you’re trying to achieve, allowing a broad group of people to be a part of shaping that vision 鈥� we think that is really important. I continue to admire the tenacity, the creativity, the courage and the resilience of our educators. My greatest hope is that this book will be an encouragement to them and there will be something in it that they can use to improve their practice, feel more effective, find more sustainability in their roles, and that these ideas may unlock new visions for them of how they could utilize the people in their system. 

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