Our Story
For the past 14+ years, we have worked to help school systems and states use research-based support to reinforce visionary leadership, develop excellent teaching, and reach greater student success.
Potential, ignited.
Every day, teachers grapple with how to ensure every student learns what they need to be ready for a bright future. Where to focus isn’t always obvious.
For more than a decade, we’ve helped teachers grow their leadership so they can transform opportunity across schools and communities. Together, we’re making systemic change that gets results.
The Challenge
Students’ success in school is affected by a staggering number of societal factors that education alone cannot solve. But, we believe education is our biggest chance to create generational freedom and mobility. Within schools, the importance of great teachers is unmatched.
Too few students are learning what they need for college and careers because they don’t have the opportunity. Fewer than half of students are fully prepared for their next step, and this figure falls much lower for students of color and those experiencing poverty.
In the last decade, learning standards have risen significantly to prepare all students for choice-filled lives, but support for teachers to strengthen their teaching has not kept pace. This dynamic has created staggering—but fixable—opportunity gaps that require systemic change beyond the actions a single teacher can take alone.
Our Solution
Since our founding in 2011, we have believed that excellent teaching is the key to igniting real opportunity and real results. When we support teachers to be their best, they can inspire students to think deeply about their learning, find confidence in themselves, and grasp the knowledge to build the world they imagine.
Today, we nurture unique partnerships that not only offer direct support for teachers, but that also strengthen the conditions and learning infrastructure around them. No one teacher can change the trajectory of education alone, but schools full of “leading educators” can lift up communities and change lives.
“It can be easy to develop teachers around changes in standards, but what sets [Leading Educators] apart is looking at how teachers can be a part of the change necessary to breaking the injustices any underrepresented group experiences.”
– DC Public Schools leader
Our Journey
Passionate, supported teachers are the foundation of strong schools. Our support evolves as we learn so teachers can lift all students to great heights.
2008-2011: Why We Exist
Leading Educators started from a belief in the potential for leadership to change students’ lives.
New Orleans was facing an overhaul of the education system that magnified challenges to ensuring consistent, quality learning for all students in a highly decentralized school landscape. We launched a Louisiana pilot program with the support of Teaching Leaders to develop teacher leadership and equip experienced teachers to support their peers’ growth amid rapid change.
From a promising start, we expanded our pilot program in Orleans Parish into a two-year fellowship for mid-career teachers, creating formal and functional opportunities for them to develop their peers. We provided professional development workshops, mentorship, and national networking opportunities mapped to two pathways: coaching and leading teams.
2011: Emergence of a Teacher Leadership Movement
Leaders in other cities became interested in developing teacher leader pipelines, so Leading Educators launched another fellowship program in Kansas City. New teacher leaders participated in professional development sessions, coaching, and school visit trips to exchange ideas.
These experiences and feedback drove us to identify four focuses (developing self, coaching others, leading teams, and driving initiatives) that later shaped, Leading from the Front of the Classroom: A Roadmap to Teacher Leadership that Works. By 2014, we offered fellowship programs in New Orleans, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., and Memphis.
2013: A Systemic Approach in Washington, D.C.
Fellowships around the country and collaborations with Denver Public Schools, the Tennessee Department of Education, and the Noble Street Network of Schools showed promising results. But we also realized that student outcomes weren’t consistent and often depended on teachers’ working conditions in addition to support. Districts continued to seek advice with defining effective teacher leader roles, raising an opportunity to build capacity for teacher leadership development within school districts themselves.
We shared these findings in Sharing the Lead, A Culture of High Expectations and Core Leadership. Soon after, DC Public Schools decided to build on its nationally-recognized teaching reforms with a program known as Teacher Leadership Innovation (TLI) and chose LE as a strategic partner.
2016: Shift to Content- and Team-Based Approach
Seeing strong results from TLI and new challenges with implementing rigorous curricula, DC Public Schools worked with LE to transition TLI into LEAP, a first-of-its-kind strategy to scale teacher leadership and a weekly seminar learning approach to 115 schools.
Using lessons learned from this partnership, LE began to transition from fellowship programs to providing a systemic model with expanded support from the classroom up to the central-office level. To help states enable similar opportunities, we worked with Ed First and leaders in 9 states to write a State Teacher Leadership Toolkit: Created by States, for States.
2017-2019: Expansion of Systemic Partnerships
Early results from LEAP indicated that students at all grade levels of DC Public Schools were achieving record growth in math and English language arts. Analysis of implementation trends from the first year allowed us to refine our approach while gradually developing more capacity within the district to own program design and implementation.
We expanded development opportunities focused on the connection between expectations and content. By the summer of 2017, we designed and launched two additional systemic support models.
Recognizing the opportunity to accomplish more durable results with deep systemic partnerships, LE began exclusively offering customized instructional improvement packages rooted in research-based learning practices in 2018. This model continues today, addressing a range of opportunities, including curriculum, learning structures, coaching, and condition development.
2020-2023: Strengthening Learning Infractructure
Amid the larger shifts occurring during the pandemic, we pioneered hybrid supports and released a series of frameworks focused on where education can go next. These focused on integrating academics, well-being, technology, and expectations in ways that better meet students’ unique strengths.
We also began to offer expanded system advising supports to school systems in the early stages of strengthening or articulating a vision, building professional learning systems, and adopting new HQIM.
Our innovation efforts started to explore new horizons and facets of instructional practice, especially technology-enabled teaching.
2024-Present: Proving What's Possible
We continue to champion the success of all students through deeply contextualized partnerships that build capacity around all parts of a strong instructional system and innovations that push teaching and learning into new horizons. Several partnerships reached historic rates of improvement despite national declines in literacy and math, proving what is possible.
We have now launched Science of Reading and Next Generation Science networks that reflect changing instructional needs and focus areas within the sector at large.
Following the release and uptake of the Value Add of Technology on Teaching (VATT) framework, we expanded our innovation capacity and agenda to play a leading role in developing AI-powered instructional supports and strengthening the teaching profession. We’re now running the first-of-its-kind School Teams AI Collaborative.
Meet Our Team
Our people are our strength. They make up a vibrant, diverse community of experienced classroom educators, former school and system leaders, content and coaching experts, and fearless strategists.
Together, we aspire to help schools and families reach their shared goals for students no matter what it takes.
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