[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Baeder.
[00:11] Justin Baeder:
Welcome, everyone, to Principal Center Radio. I'm your host, Justin Baeder, and I'm honored to welcome to the program John Travis. John is Senior Program Officer for Education at the Barr Foundation, where he focuses on the teacher and school leadership pipeline to help recruit, develop, retain, and cultivate the talented, diverse educators needed for the schools of today and tomorrow. John came to Barr after nearly 15 years as a frontline educator, first as a high school mathematics teacher in New Jersey, and then as a school and district leader in the Boston Public Schools. And in his most recent role, he served as the principal of the Orenberger School in West Roxbury. Prior to leading at the Orenberger, he trained as a principal fellow at the Harvard-Kent Elementary School in Charlestown and worked as director of human capital strategy with the Boston Public Schools Central Office, supporting school leadership pipeline development.
[00:57] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:59] Justin Baeder:
John, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[01:01] John Travis:
Thanks for having me.
[01:03] Justin Baeder:
Well, I'm excited to talk with you about a current initiative of the Barr Foundation to strengthen school leadership called Strengthening School Leadership. Why don't we start by just having you tell us a little bit about the origin of that initiative and what some of the design features of it are?
[01:17] John Travis:
Yeah, absolutely. And thanks again for having me. So the Strengthening School Leadership initiative at Barr predates my time at the foundation. So I joined Barr in 2022, as you mentioned, like stepping actually right out of the school leadership seat. And this actually was the body of work I was the most interested in. When I took on the role of leading the investment educator strategy at Barr, because the problem it was trying to solve felt like a very palpable, real problem that I was stepping out of, which is like, hey, how do we get school leadership right to ensure that the humans that we are asking to lead our schools towards excellence and great outcomes for all of our students are actually able to do that work incredibly well.
[01:56]
And I think that there are some indicators that we knew about here in the state of Massachusetts that were telling us that we had concerns about the sort of the state of affairs, about the role of school leadership across the state. So the work launched really back in 2019 with a report that was authored with a range of different stakeholders across the state, like leaders and experts. trying to articulate, like, what do we think is going on with school leadership in the state? Are there things that we're concerned about and what are those concerns and challenges and what might look like to try to address them? And so there were four main challenges that were named back in that opening report that was authored by our partners, Tuned Education Partners. One challenge was about the scope of the role, which I'd love to get into a little bit.
[02:38]
This just growing sense that the expectations that we place on school leaders have grown over time, and the role has become multifaceted and increasingly complex, and therefore very hard for single humans to fully embody and be excellent in all of the different things we're expecting of them. And then there's a range of other related challenges from the quality of preparation for the role, for the kind of pragmatic experiences that... first novice school leaders are having before they step into the seat. Challenges with the presence or absence actually in a lot of contexts of like an orientation towards coaching and supervision of school leaders.
[03:16]
Like what does it look like to help school leaders get better at what the thing is that they do? In our districts across the Commonwealth, structured or set up in a way to ensure that that work happens versus, hey, we hired you, you're in charge of the school, like you figure it out kind of thing. And then one of the other core challenges that we named is that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with a growing and diversifying student population, there was a demographic mismatch between the students who attend our schools and the people who lead them. So those were like kind of the four key challenges that were named at the outset of that body of work. And really it was an opportunity we did through open request for proposals process back in 2019 for districts that were interested in trying to say, what does it look like for us in our state to tackle these challenges? And so here we are in 2025 with a lot of ambitious work that has happened in the districts that launched it.
[04:07]
And from the learning, we have been doing some work to expand that body work. I'd be happy to talk a little bit more about. But at a high level, that's sort of where the genesis of this effort was and happy to get into some of the details.
[04:18] Justin Baeder:
Let's talk about the districts and what they were looking for, because certainly on an individual level, we can all agree, our listeners are nodding along, that this job is hard and it seems to be getting broader. The scope of responsibility seems to be growing every year. So certainly we recognize that challenge. And when the districts submitted their proposals, what were they hoping to accomplish?
[04:39] John Travis:
So I think that has shifted and changed over time. And so there's what the Strengthening School Leadership Initiative started as way back in 2019, how it has evolved in the work with those districts. If 2019 is ringing bells for any of our listeners out there in schools and were in work then, we went through some stuff since 2019. A global pandemic, for instance, the implications of which are still being felt in schools to this day. So the work has evolved and I think when a lot of the districts originally set out, it really was this vision of like, how do we ensure we have a really strong cadre and pipeline of leaders? How do we identify them, prepare them, put them in place, and then once they are, ensure that they thrive?
[05:19]
And how do we do that not only on our own as a district, but potentially by leveraging expert partners, like organizations, outside organizations that have expertise in developing, training, supporting school leaders to basically come alongside our districts and help us think differently about how we have our work structured, set up and designed. And so I would say that the work has evolved over time. I think that there was a time when the problem we thought we were trying to solve was ensuring we have a great leader in every school. It's like, but maybe like, let's just get the preparation part right. And then we got great prepared school leaders in every single school, and then we'll be okay. But the challenge is, and I have like prior personal experiences with this, is that that's not enough, but it's not enough to just hire a bunch of great people.
[06:08]
How do you ensure that the systems and structures that a district has enables the people who are in those seats to do their job as effectively as possible? How do you remove barriers where you can? How do you ensure coherence and alignment in a school system? And I would say one of the pernicious challenges that we are still dealing with and is likely true for a lot of our contexts that are still active in this work that started it years ago, six years ago, Knowing that the classroom instruction is actually the thing that almost everyone is after, wanting to see improved outcomes for students, improved instruction happening in classrooms, and just how hard it is for a leader to focus their time there, either directly or even in how they lead their school indirectly through secondary leaders. We do some surveys with our work to see what we are learning across our systems.
[06:58]
And when we gathered a little over a year ago, one of the persistent challenges still was that so many of our school leaders across the places where we're doing work would still say they were not able to spend as much time as they would want trying to focus on instructional leadership.
[07:13] Justin Baeder:
So it sounds like part of the goal for districts is, as you said, quality leaders in every school, having people who are equipped to do the job, having a system that is responsive to their needs and set up in ways that make it functional. And I can certainly... Appreciate the challenges there having worked in a large district, Seattle Public Schools, which I would not describe as dysfunctional, but it is a large system. And anytime you're dealing with systems like that, people run into challenges where the organization needs to learn how to meet the needs of the people who are on the front lines.
[07:45]
And then it also strikes me that there are just changing issues in society. You know, as you said, the role gets bigger. Even people who were well prepared may not be prepared for the new challenges. And certainly we've been through a lot in the past couple of years. So I wonder if we could talk a little bit now about the people who are personally experiencing the Strengthening School Leadership program now. What's some of the learning that they are embarking on to meet those challenges?
[08:11] John Travis:
Yeah, and I think the way I would say it too is that the strength in school leadership, we use the nomenclature like an initiative and not so much a program because, you know, program sort of implies like there's a really codified and set way of doing a thing in all places in the same way, which is great. Actually, it's really important to have really high quality programs, but that's not what this initiative is. I would really say that it's basically a change initiative for districts, right? And it's really a process of how do districts shift their systems, structures, practices, training, development, support in order to enable success of the school, not only the school leaders, but really actually everybody who is implicated on the line of instructional improvement from the people who coach, supervise and develop school leaders in a district.
[09:02]
down to the school leaders, to the folks that lead instructional teams in schools, whether they be assistant administrators or teacher leaders, but like a full articulation of having all of those humans basically swim and row in the same direction, if that makes sense. And that's what I think the work has been after, but it's actually articulated very differently across the districts that we've been working with, especially with our original cohort. We expect and anticipate with the launch of the new cohort of districts that we're going to continue to learn about different ways that this work could look. I mean, just to give you an example, we have a case study that's going to be coming out and going to be published shortly on our website about a change initiative in one of our districts. original districts, Holyoke, Massachusetts, which is a high needs local education agency in Western Massachusetts. And Holyoke has been a part of our original cohort that started all the way back in 2019.
[09:56]
And one of the things that they have been sort of after is like building an internal language within their leadership about like, what is the vision of what good instruction in the classroom looks like? Is everyone speaking the same language? And if you talk to someone in your district, someone at the school leader, if you talk to an assistant administrator, all the way down to the classroom, like, would everyone say the same thing about what it is we're after, how we're trying to get there? And so that's a lot of the work they've been endeavoring to do. They've been partnered with a national organization, Relay Graduate School of Education, and have been working in close partnership with them where there's been both training, coaching, professional learning happening at multiple tiers of the system, from teacher leaders up through school-based administrative and other leaders to school leaders themselves to district leaders, all being sort of like trained and designed in the same direction.
[10:46]
And that's like just one part of it. One of the other things the Holyoke Public Schools had pursued in their project was trying to shift and differentiate roles like school based roles around both like instructional leadership and operations, for instance, too, which has been another trend that has been in the ether here over the last few years. Ways to take things off of the school leaders plate to allow them to focus on instruction more.
[11:09] Justin Baeder:
Yeah, let's talk about that kind of distributed leadership or ways of thinking about different distributions of the work that traditionally is assigned to the principal. And of course, in other schools, you might have assistant principals and you might have deans and people in roles like that. What are some of the more interesting and perhaps novel approaches that people are taking? I'm thinking about the School Administration Manager Project, which I studied quite a bit years ago that attempted to take Administrative tasks, you know, the kind of day-to-day stuff, fills up a principal's day and, you know, have someone else to take a lot of that on. Tell us a little bit about what you've seen in that department.
[11:45] John Travis:
Yeah, and again, I think there's been a lot of different sort of approaches to it. I actually think one of the most novel approaches within our original cohort of districts that started back in 2019 was actually the work that happened really close to Holyoke, next door in Springfield, Massachusetts, within the Empowerment Zone, one of our other grantees, they actually created something that they called the Equitable Pathways to Leadership Program. And this was basically, whereas a lot of our other LEAs pursued work that was like very like whole district focused, if that makes sense, like infrastructure building sort of work. This work was like very locally focused on the school. in trying to coach up, support, and develop basically a team of people alongside the school leader to drive shifts in instructional change and practice. So you might have assistant administrators, teachers, and sort of cross-functional roles that all do common professional learning together, all get coached individually, separately.
[12:43]
And all are working towards a school improvement goal that is they're pursuing basically data inquiry cycles of improvement related to. And so that's been one of those. And again, in a lot of ways, it's been a capacity building kind of orientation to the way people have engaged in the work. But I will say that like the remain challenges, like I wish I could stand here and say that like. From the work we've already done since 2019 that we've figured things out or we know exactly what it is, we actually are trying to pursue even more rigorously. When we launched the work originally, we did not launch the initiative alongside a research and evaluation partner.
[13:19]
So we've been doing a lot of retrospective sort of codification of learning for work that's happened. But because we think that there have been these sort of nuggets of bright spots and things that Our districts in particular have been really proud of and excited about this work. Now, as we launch our new districts with our 2025 cohort, we are launching alongside a research and evaluation partner in MDRC out of New York City. So that basically I could give you an even better answer than I'm able to now about some of the like unique in particulars, because the truth is the way the work has looked over time really has morphed and evolved. And I think we at the foundation, we remain incredibly close to it. But even still, I...
[13:56]
One of our core values is to act with humility. I'm nervous that I would tell you that I think that we have figured something out because I'm not sure that we have. I think we are on the process to trying to get there, though.
[14:05] Justin Baeder:
I wonder if without giving away too many secrets, you could give us some insight into the difference between a successful applicant and an unsuccessful applicant, because surely districts everywhere are saying, give us money. You know, if you have money, I'd like to have it. What is a good sign to you? What are some green flags that a district is actually poised to give you a good educational return on an investment like that?
[14:29] John Travis:
Yeah, that's a great question. So thanks for asking it. It's the kind of work that keeps me up at night. It's like, how do we make our decisions really well as a foundation? I think the thing we were mostly looking for as a group, because we actually went through an application process and we had a pretty rigorous internal process. So even though I'm the one leading the project, literally every member of the education program team at our foundation participated.
[14:51]
We received 16 applications, basically, for what wound up being five districts that we were able to move forward with. And a lot of, I think, what we were looking for was evidence of some of the enabling conditions we think are necessary for great work to happen with a philanthropic partner. One of Barr's core values is to invest in leaders. So leadership is top among them. What do we think is the state of leadership in the system? Not just the person in charge of it, but all the way down through the system?
[15:15]
Do we feel like they have... the leadership they need in order to take advantage of an opportunity like this and to kind of move it forward. That's absolutely one thing we're looking at. Resonance and consonance with Barr's core values is another key indicator that we were sort of looking for.
[15:29]
Readiness to do this kind of work, like One of the challenges we were also kind of navigating and we sort of anticipated is with the presence of a lot of our ESSER resources that districts had had that over the last few years, some districts may have done similar kinds of work already themselves. And with those funds sort of waning, they might have just wanted to come to us just to say, hey, like, we got a good thing here. Can you just give us some money so we can kind of keep doing that thing? So one of the hardest things to sort of look for is like how ready is a school system to to get honest with themselves about their current practice and like really interested in change. And that's a really tough thing to assess, like the willingness and readiness for change. But we try to, through both the written applications as well as follow-ups with some of our like finalist districts, and we always do additional diligence sort of outside of that for trying to make sense of readiness.
[16:24]
We came down to like these five systems across the state from Western Massachusetts to North of Boston to the South Shore that we thought had some of the particulars ready for kind of taking on this kind of change work. And I'm eager to see where their work goes in the years to come.
[16:40] Justin Baeder:
Yeah. Well, I appreciate your insights there because, you know, I think the strategic nature of your investments distinguishes the work that your foundation is doing from, you know, charity. Like you're not giving districts money because you feel sorry for them. You're giving them money because you believe that they will make good use of it and develop leaders who will make a difference. And I think that's a crucial distinction.
[16:59] John Travis:
Yeah. And I would say, too, one of the other big things that was in the call for this RFP is an interest in being leaders themselves, not just within their systems, but beyond. As I mentioned, we have a research and evaluation partner in MDRC that's going to be coming alongside and being actually a little closer to these districts as like an external evaluation partner than we have with our original districts when we first launched. And not every district necessarily wants to be potentially put under a microscope in that way and have their change process sort of like tracked and followed. But another thing that we're really looking for is that for systems that want to be seats of learning for others, because we believe that there are some like nuggets here about things that we are learning, especially contextualized in our context. I mean, there are other foundations who've done tremendous work.
[17:44]
related to school leadership. The Wallace Foundation in particular is like, you have to acknowledge, like, I feel like we were standing on the shoulders of giants who've done tremendous work in this area. But even for a lot of Wallace's sort of like seminal work around school leadership, In New England, which is the regional focus of the Barr Foundation, those six New England states, our largest school district is the Boston Public Schools, where I came from. And it's largest by far. I mean, it's almost twice as big as like the next largest district. And Boston barely cracks the top 100.
[18:14]
of like size of national districts, you know, somewhere, you know, between 45 and 50,000 students. So that's large for our region, but it's pretty small when you compare LEAs and districts across the country. And we think a lot of Wallace's work is applicable completely to different contexts. And yet it seems like As much as we have that research, lots of folks haven't just like taken up the recommendations themselves everywhere. And we're kind of trying to figure out why to some degree, like if there are things that we think we know works around school leadership, like why isn't it happening at scale elsewhere? And we actually do think that there is a scale challenge for what does it look like to do that work at a system level when you go from a district that is 100,000 to a district that is 8,000 students and where the number of people and how many hats different staff are wearing just looks really different at both the district and the school level because that's what districts in our region look like.
[19:11]
We're really curious to learn more about what it looks like for them to undergo these kinds of changes and transformations.
[19:17] Justin Baeder:
Well, we will definitely link in the show notes to the case study that you mentioned. I wonder if you have any advice for a district that maybe is not in your region, does not necessarily have the opportunity to benefit directly from your foundation's work. If you had a couple of takeaways or a couple of words of wisdom for a district that wants to engage in this work, but maybe is smaller, or maybe the influence of one particular leader is limited, what would be some of your top recommendations based on lessons learned from your work at the Barr Foundation?
[19:46] John Travis:
Yeah, I mean, so I mentioned standing on shoulders. If you're a district leader and you're not familiar with the Wallace Foundation's work around principal pipelines, please go and read. Their website is pretty easily Google-able. I cited it often in my graduate school capstone as I was doing work related to school leadership pipelines in the Boston public schools. So I think they are a tremendous resource and have a tremendous number of recommendations. So I would not claim that the Barr Foundation is like the best place for you to go.
[20:10]
There are other people who know way more about lots of this work. There are sort of two things. One is We think there's something unique and special and important about the role of an external partner that has expertise in the development of instructional leadership, school leadership, beyond just what an LEA is able to do on its own. And while it can seem like these kinds of things might be cost prohibitive, some of the costs associated with it are, you know, at least in our region, look like the annual cost of like one or two positions maybe across your entire district in order to pay for this kind of partnership. So I actually don't think that like what we are doing with these districts is out of reach for almost any LEA to take a step to try to find an external partner and think really critically about how you might engage with them. But some of the things I think that really are important.
[21:01]
One, if you really are after transformational change, it takes time. It takes a lot of time. If we are learning anything, it takes years sometimes for you to see all the fruits of that body of work. So we are trying to think about how do you, are there ways to accelerate that? Can we learn about that? Like these are things that we were after with the new cohort.
[21:18]
And then I wish I could hand something that was like even more turnkey than this kind of statement. But one of the questions that I've come to system leaders with and did again in this process is just asking them, hey, can you articulate the infrastructure for instructional improvement in your district? Like imagine a single classroom somewhere in your school district. And imagine it way better, the teaching and learning way better a year from now. How do you think that would happen? What's your theory of change as a district around how that would happen?
[21:54]
I think, unfortunately, in a lot of districts, that's a very hard thing for district leaders at scale to clearly articulate. They might be able to talk about roles. They might be able to talk about... systems or like, hey, that's what this role does, et cetera.
[22:08]
But like really being able to articulate like we as a district do this and schools do this and teachers do this and therefore being able to like think through that. And then once you have it clear what that infrastructure is, being able to ask yourself, is it working everywhere? Or are there assumptions that we have about what we think would happen? When you talk about the implementation of high quality instructional materials, for instance, which has been all the rage across the country, super important work, I'm broadly supportive of any initiative that's trying to put great kinds of tasks in front of kids. But what does it take to help a classroom teacher who hasn't accessed this kind of curriculum before go from being unsure about it to really confident in driving it and driving great outcomes for the kids in their classroom? How are you doing that thing?
[22:55]
I think it's not as simple as we bought the curriculum, right? And I think most people know that. Or we bought the curriculum and we trained the teachers. Those are great. I'm not saying you shouldn't do those things. But being really clear about where it's working, because we have found that the more you can get clear, the more you can sort of pressure test what's maybe not working and then make adjustments.
[23:15]
Yeah. So, again, if you have a district instructional leadership team and that is not a question you have an answer for, like, I'd encourage you, like, put it on the agenda and start talking about it, because most likely any conversation that's about that's really trying to get to the experience that students are having in classrooms every day, yeah, you're close to the instructional core, like what Richard Elmore would talk about, and I think you're more likely to drive the kind of outcomes for kids that they deserve.
[23:41] Justin Baeder:
John Travis, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. It's been a pleasure.
[23:44] John Travis:
It's been a pleasure, Justin. Thanks so much for your time.
[23:46] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.
