New Leaders: Giving Tuesday
What if every child attended a great public school?
What if there were a team of leaders in each school with the skills to support academic excellence for ALL students?
What if these leaders already exist-and they need your support?
This holiday season, I hope you will join me in supporting New Leaders, a national non-profit where I am a proud staff member, as part of Giving Tuesday, a national movement beginning December 2nd encourage people to give back during the holidays.
We at New Leaders recruit outstanding educators from across the country and develop them into transformational principals and leaders for students in high-poverty schools.
In the Bay Area, one such outstanding leader is Shawn Benjamin of Leadership Public Schools-Richmond. When Shawn arrived as assistant principal in 2005, the high school’s culture was broken: students had seen a churn of principals, violence was common, and parents felt angry and betrayed. Shawn became principal in 2007 and first focused on school culture, creating an environment that was safe and nurturing. She then drilled down into learning and teaching, raising the academic bar and making sure that every child was pushed to his or her fullest potential. LPS-Richmond is unrecognizable today: it was awarded a silver medal in U.S. News and World Report’s “Best High Schools in the US,” a designation given to only 9% of high schools nationwide. LPS-Richmond is now a place where over 200 AP exams are taken each year and 98% of seniors are accepted into college.
“LPS-Richmond has helped me by getting me ready for college,” says student Tiye Gordon, “even though I didn’t think I was going to make it.”
Every student deserves a Shawn in his or her school. The great news is that we have dozens more just like her: we are currently training 101 current and future principals like Shawn right here in the Bay Area, with the same grit and determination to see their students succeed no matter what. And they need your support.
I hope you will support our efforts this holiday season by investing in training more leaders like Shawn. Any amount will make a difference. I believe that supporting education is the most important thing we can do for our children and for our country-and that making sure every school has a great leader is the best way to start.
I deeply appreciate any contribution you can make to support New Leaders and help change the lives of kids here in the Bay Area and across the nation.
Help fund the training, development, and support of transformational school leaders
New Leaders trains tomorrow’s principals. The people who join this program share a deep belief that all students can achieve at high levels – that demography is not destiny for children in low-income communities. Your gift will support New leaders so they can more adeptly transform underperforming public schools and make a real difference in the lives of students from low-income communities.
About New Leaders
New Leaders seeks to ensure high academic achievement for all children—especially students in poverty and students of color—by developing transformational school leaders and advancing the policies and practices that allow great leaders to succeed.
Why focus on great leaders? School principals are the driving force behind school improvement. One outstanding teacher isn’t enough; students require multiple years of effective teachers to reach academic excellence, especially if they have fallen behind. Strong principals have the skills to support their existing staff to become outstanding teachers and to keep the strongest educators in their schools.
New Leaders’ leadership training begins with our Emerging Leaders Program, which builds a pipeline of promising future school leaders by growing the abilities of talented educators over the course of a year to lead other adults in raising student achievement.
Many Emerging Leaders go on to join our signature Aspiring Principals Program, a rigorous, one-year residency through which we train highly motivated, results-oriented individuals to strengthen our most struggling schools. To ensure that we get the best leaders into schools, we also identify promising talent through a national admissions process.
After their residency, we support our leaders in their critical first years on the job through the Principal Institute, which employs professional learning communities and strategic one-on-one coaching for one or two years to ensure our new principals—and their students—are set up for success. And with our new Leadership Practice Improvement program, we train current school principals and their leadership teams in best practices to raise student achievement.
Tell Lydia why you this cause!