| Top down reforms have often been a reaction to a perceived crisis in education, and do not help struggling schools build instructional capacity, as the reforms do not tend to last long-term. Some schools, within districts, with a distribution of leadership, are able to focus upon building sustainable internal capacity for improvement. Current research suggests that leadership is more effective if shared amongst the professional staff, including teaching and administrative staffing. This study explored the work of teachers and school-level administrators in an Innovation School, looking at how principals and teachers work together to build sustainable instructional capacity in an urban, struggling public school district. Research focused on how teachers and principals design, develop and work from a shared leadership practice in this unique school concept.;The school under study was a designated Innovation School, granted autonomies, or freedoms to develop staffing, curriculum, professional development, and scheduling choices independent of the school system in order to develop a successful school for student learning. This descriptive case study used Leithwood et al. (2007) Core Leadership Tasks (Setting Direction, Developing People, Redesigning the Organization, and Managing the Instructional Program) as a theoretical framework to understand the effectiveness of this Innovation School design an implementation. Using interviews, research showed a school that developed and ran an effective program using the appointed autonomies as effectively as allowed. Long-term sustainability is suspect due to budget limitations, ineffectual use of instructional coaches, prioritizing data over instruction and curriculum, and the pressure to continue to innovate, resulting in a lack of programmatic depth. Future research in innovation and /or in-district independent charter schools suggests the need to study organizational trends, effectiveness of instructional coaches as support in classroom, continued study into limitations around new initiatives in regards to teacher effectiveness, and the importance of granting true independence to such educational experiments. |
