Faculty members from UW–Madison’s School of Education will be playing important roles in studying a major new effort supported by the Wallace Foundation.
The foundation’s Equity-Centered Pipeline initiative includes eight large, high-needs school districts across the United States that will create principal pipelines to prepare school leaders who can bring a district’s own vision of equity and student success to fruition.
The Wallace Foundation estimates the cost of the program to be $102 million over the next five years. These efforts, which launched in the fall of 2021, will be led at the local level by each district, in partnership with community organizations, two university leader preparation programs, and the state education agency.
The team of researchers from UW–Madison will be leading one key aspect of this work with a project titled, A CALL for Equity-Centered Leadership (CALL- ECL). These efforts will document district attempts to prepare a new generation of school leaders and will create support tools to guide equity-centered leader- ship in schools.
Welton, Carolyn Kelley, and John Diamond.
“The CALL-ECL project will tackle one of the most important education issues today: Can we prepare leaders to create more equitable schools for students and communities?” says UW–Madison’s Richard Halverson, a professor with the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA) who is a lead researcher on the six-year, $8 million grant that will allow the team to study the work of the districts and develop tools to help support the principal pipe- line efforts.
Over the past 20 years, research supported by the Wallace Foundation has found that effective principals have a significant positive impact on students and schools. There is similarly strong evidence for the benefits of comprehensive, aligned principal pipelines of the kind that the eight districts across the country plan to develop.
This next generation of Wallace research will explore successful strategies for developing and selecting high-quality principals who can be effective in identifying and overcoming the deep, structural causes of inequity that shape many schools.
“As a nation, we urgently need a new generation of school leaders who can create conditions for teaching and learning in schools that support social justice, achievement, and equity,” says Halverson.
Halverson is a principal investigator on the project with John Diamond, who had served as a faculty member for the past eight years with the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis before leaving for Brown University in January 2022. Faculty members from UW–Madison involved with the CALL-ECL project team include co-PIs Anjalé Welton and Carolyn Kelley from the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. Welton is a nationally recognized expert in anti-racist school leadership, and Kelley has spent more than two decades studying the effects of leadership on student learning.
In addition, Mark Blitz from the Wisconsin Center for Education Products and Services, will guide the CALL-ECL survey development process, while the project will be housed in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research.
This work will feature Halverson and Kelley’s Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL) suite of services and tools — and will develop, test, and implement a new version of CALL to assess and support equity-centered leadership (CALL-ECL).
“We believe the CALL-ECL project will deliver an actionable roadmap for how leaders can create more equitable schools,” says Halverson. “The Wallace effort to redefine equity-centered leadership preparation has the potential to transform the field of education leadership.”