Distributed Leadership at the Middle
School Level: Evidence from the Field
By Rahel Kahlert, Andrew Sobel, Ali Callicoatte Picucci and Amanda Brownson, Ph.D.
About the study:
Driven to Succeed: High-Performing, High-Poverty, Turnaround Middle Schools (2002) by Ali Calliciatte Picucci, Amanda
Brownson, Rahel Kahlert, & Andrew Sobel. Austin: Charles A. Dana Center. 2002.
The study was funded by the U.S. Department of Education to investigate how seven high-poverty middle schools in the
U.S. managed to demonstrate strong academic improvement. The schools were chosen because a majority of students came
from low socioeconomic backgrounds, and performance data for the schools showed above average growth and performance
in reading and mathematics achievement in their respective states. Because most of the previous work in the area of best
practices has focused on elementary schools, this study focused on the middle grades. Findings include a culture of high
expectations, individual student support, collaborative decisionmaking, and systematic reform as factors that promoted achievement. For more information see: http://www.utdanacenter.org/research/index.html.
Introduction
In Building a New Structure for School Leadership, Richard
Elmore explains how much of the literature on school leadership suggests that principals should embody all types of exemplary skills and characteristics, including being a visionary leader,
an effective facilitator, a conflict mediator, an instructional leader,
and a master of human relations who is in close touch with the
students, staff, school district, and the extended school community. Elmore suggests that in this high-demand job, relief
could come through a redefinition of principal leadership:
In a knowledge-intensive enterprise like teaching and learning, there is no way to perform these complex tasks without widely distributing the responsibility for leadership
([again,] guidance and direction) among roles in the organization, and without working hard at creating a common
culture, or set of values, symbols, and rituals (p. 15).
According to Elmore, distributed leadership takes into account
the particular competencies at a school. A principal’s task is
organizing and taking advantage of every person’s diverse com-
Rahel Kahlert is a Research Associate with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She currently participates in studies
about educational resource allocation and evaluation of professional development initiatives. Ms. Kahlert received the 2001 Emmette S. Redford
Award for Outstanding Research. Ms. Kahlert holds a Master of Public Affairs from the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at The
University of Texas at Austin and a Master of Theology from the University of Vienna, Austria.
Andrew Sobel is a Research Associate with the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas as Austin. He is pursing a doctorate in
educational policy. His areas of interest are parental power and social justice.
Ali Callicoatte Picucci is currently a sociology doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is working with Professor Chandra
Muller examining the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement (AHAA) study. Her current work focuses on how access to advanced coursetaking in math and science differs by race and gender, as well as the influence of school offerings on opportunities to learn. Her main areas of
research include Sociology of Education, and Social Stratification.
Amanda Bright Brownson, Ph.D., is an experienced educational researcher, with specialties in school finance, statistical analyses, and
performance evaluation. She has a background in research at The UT-Austin Charles A. Dana Center and the Educational Productivity
Council. In addition, Ms. Brownson brings experience from the classroom at both local and higher-education levels. She received her Ph.D. in
Education Policy and Planning from UT-Austin in 2002 and is certified in both administrative and teaching areas.
20 • Fall 2003 Texas Study
petencies. Distributed leadership, then, means multiple sources
of guidance and direction, following the contours of expertise
in an organization, made coherent through common culture.
Distributed leadership does not mean that no one is responsible for the overall performance of the organization (Elmore
2000, p.15). It is not a laissez-faire approach. It means, rather,
that a school principal is in charge of the overall direction of the
school. A principal holds together the threads by promoting a
common culture of expectations.
Findings from our study Driven to Succeed: High-Performing,
High-Poverty, Turnaround Middle Schools demonstrate how the
principals resolved their demands on their own leadership. We
found evidence that these principals promoted a distributed leadership style rather than top-down style.
Vignettes of Distributed Middle School Leadership
The degree of distributed leadership varied across schools, but
there was evidence that a certain degree of distributed leadership was in place in all of them. The following three vignettes
illuminate different leadership settings that supported distributed leadership while maintaining responsibility for a school’s
overall direction.
Tonasket Middle School—Supporting teachers’ initiatives
At Tonasket Middle School, located in rural Washington state,
teachers appreciated their working relationship with the principal. He made them feel professional. Teachers felt that many of
the positive changes at their school had originated from their
own ideas, and were supported by their principal. One teacher
noted:
Things have become ours—many things have become our
decision to make. And we make those as a group. You know,
the principal leads us in that direction maybe a lot of times,
but we end up figuring it out somehow and…it happens
that way.
Teachers described an opportunity to take initiative. Before their
turnaround, the majority of students were failing. A teacher
explained that students failed, but then were passed on to the
next grade level, and the failing students did not receive systematic remediation. For example, many different aides were
scattered in the school building and worked randomly and briefly
with students.
Teachers recalled how the idea to create the Discovery Room, a
centralized location for remediation, developed during a staff
meeting. According to one teacher, things “just kind of rolled
out.” It was a “Eureka kind of thing.”
The principal at Tonasket Middle School listened to the teachers’ concerns and ideas and decided that their idea deserved
support. He transferred one of the most experienced teachers
from her classroom to the newly established Discovery Room
where she and the aides provided students with support during
the whole school day. Teachers found that the investment paid
off because they saw student achievement increasing in the following years.
Looking back on this process, a teacher noted:
It’s amazing what you can come up with if you think you
can get rid of all the you can’t do this, you can’t do that. All
the limitations that they put on us with all our funds. When
they took those [limitations] away, it enabled people to do
some good things.
Pocomoke Middle School—Sharing planning for school improvement
At Pocomoke Middle School, Maryland, teachers appreciated
their principal’s effort to seek their participation in
decisionmaking. One teacher explained that the principal had
done an effective job of striking the difficult balance between
sharing decisionmaking with staff and being willing to take
responsibility when necessary:
I think [the principal] has done a good job of … saying
“I’m open to certain things.” At the same time she’ll make
the final decision … I felt like if we have something reasonable that makes sense, it will be seriously considered. So
I think that makes it more exciting to be here because you
feel like you can … actually maybe do something about
[problems that arise].
The principal was actively seeking her staff ’s participation in
the school improvement planning process and implementation.
In her own words:
Usually, from my sense of what happened in the past, it
would be the principal or one or two other people, and
generally probably just the principal saying, okay, this year
we’re going to work on so-and-so. Or the board will say
you need to work on that this year as a county goal … and
gradually as we had more staff members become involved
in the writing of the school improvement plan, you get
greater buy-in from the staff and that helps with a common language … we set four main objectives for the SIP
team and we require each staff member to sign up to be a
part of one of those action teams related to each of the four
objectives.
The principal felt that it was important to provide the time for
this increased staff involvement. In the first year, the principal
experienced difficulties, because she had to split the time of her
faculty meetings between administrative tasks and planning
tasks. In the second year, teachers worked more independently
on parts of the improvement plan outside of the faculty meetings.
One teacher explained that the team approach to decisionmaking
had been successful at Pocomoke because most teachers felt they
had a real impact on how to improve:
Fall 2003 Texas Study • 21
The idea that was exciting was the fact that it is collaborative. The idea that teachers are not just reacting to changes
that are imposed upon them. That you take ownership of
the process of improvement.
Rockcastle Middle School—Getting buy-in from the larger
community
Distributed decisionmaking went sometimes beyond the school’s
brick walls. The Rockcastle school district, located in rural Kentucky, had a K–8 and 9–12 system in place. The district decided to move to the middle school model and decided to hire
the previous K–8 principal as the new middle school principal.
The principal felt that giving people input would lessen their
concerns about moving to the middle school model. He asked
community members and teachers to be on different committees, such as a discipline committee and a budget committee, to
decide how the school was set up and run. The principal stated
that he is a firm believer of shared leadership: “When you have
authority, you have responsibility. When you share authority,
you share responsibility.”
On the new middle school campus, the principal continued his
leadership style. Teachers valued their decisionmaking power
and input about how to structure the middle school and the
curriculum. They also felt more ownership and accountability
for the students’ performance. A teacher described how he considered himself a decisionmaker at the school:
People were just in awe of the flexibility we had. And I
think that was a big catalyst to getting us off to a successful
start—people being able to make the decisions. Power was
placed in the teachers’ hands to make the decisions they
needed to make for the kids.
Conclusion
The three vignettes provide examples of middle schools that
exemplify key aspects of distributed leadership. This leadership
style is also promoted in Turning Points: Preparing American
Youth for the 21st Century (Jackson, 1989), a landmark model
in middle school education. The report focused national attention on the long-neglected needs—academic and social—of
adolescent youth, and provided a framework to guide the building of middle schools. Ten years later, Jackson revisited the Turning Points framework and provided more “flesh on the bone” to
guide practitioners in their efforts to implement the model (Jackson & Davis, 2000, p. xi). One of the seven Turning Points
22 • Fall 2003 Texas Study
2000 characteristics of a middle school is “Democratic Governance to Improve Student Learning.” Democratic governance
gives all stakeholders in the school a primary voice in planning
and implementing school improvement efforts, and “the
principal’s role is to cultivate teachers’ intrinsic motivation—
their inner voice—and to create a culture of continuous improvement” (Jackson & Davis, 2000, p.157).
Jackson recognized the importance for administrators in creating and distributing opportunities for leadership to teachers
and school staff. He also provided direction for the development of the school’s culture. It is this common thread that runs
through the vignettes. Distributed leadership (or “democratic
governance”) was exemplified in these schools by the following
key elements:
Middle School Teachers
• perceived themselves as professionals
• shared decisionmaking on instructional issues and school
improvement
• received time and support for implementing their ideas
Middle School Principals
• treated the teachers as professionals
• relied on the teachers’ expertise and supported their ideas
• provided time and resources to implement teacher
initiatives
These schools were not unique. They had similar demographics of middle schools across the U.S. Among their characteristics of success, one aspect was distributed leadership.
References
Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development (1989). Turning Points.
Preparing American Youth for the 21st Century. Washington, DC: Author.
Elmore, Richard F. Building a New Structure for School Leadership. Washington, DC: The Albert Shanker Institute. 2000.
Jackson, Anthony W., & Davis, Gayle A. (2000). Turning Points 2000.
Educating Adolescents in the 21st Century. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Picucci, Ali Callicoate, Brownson, Amanda, Kahlert, Rahel, & Sobel,
Andrew (2002). Driven to Succeed: High-Performing, High-Poverty, Turnaround Middle Schools. Volume 1: Cross-Case Analysis. Volume 2: Case
Studies. Austin, TX: Charles A. Dana Center.