Leenet Campbell-Williams on Detroit’s Education Transformation

In recent years, the Detroit Public Schools Community District has witnessed a remarkable rebirth. Leenet Campbell-Williams, the Chief Academic Officer for DPSCD, says the district’s plan for transformation has breathed new life into a city often overshadowed by challenges:

The work that we’re doing right now, to be a part of it and to see it come as far as it’s come, just makes me proud to be in Detroit.”

She brings a rich, lived perspective to the work, having been a Detroit student who went on to serve her community as a teacher, principal, and assistant superintendent.

Mrs. Campbell-Williams reflected on the district’s story of change during a presentation called “Building the Infrastructure and Habits to ‘Rise Up’” at the Council of the Great City Schools 21st Annual Curriculum and Instruction Conference in July. This blog provides a short recap of the session and Mrs. Campbell-Williams’ lessons learned in her own words (with light synthesis supported by AI) to illuminate new pathways to systemic improvement. 

It All Starts with Building a Strong Foundation

Our mission is clear: to empower every student and community, equipping them with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to thrive in Detroit, our nation, and our world. Our strategic priorities underpin this mission, which guide our efforts daily.

We recognize that the key to our success lies in creating a cohesive infrastructure that supports student achievement—what we call ‘rising up.’ This philosophy emphasizes that as our students succeed, so do we collectively.

What we learned about our district is that we have all the right ingredients. We have a high-quality, standards-aligned curriculum, professional development structures, coaches and staff members on the curriculum instruction team, deans and attendance agents in our schools—many resources and support.

We had all the right ingredients, but the way that our schools and our leaders experienced them was a little different from what we had in mind. 

They experienced them like this.

Our principals and our team said it just feels like everybody’s coming in from every angle and every direction with every initiative and every directive. We thought about how we could reach a point where all of these ingredients come together in the right way so that we could achieve our ultimate goal.

Our approach now begins with an ambitious theory of change for school improvement, which is implemented in cycles we refer to as “sprints.”

• Each sprint focuses on refining our strategies and using a sophisticated data monitoring system, a hallmark of Dr. Vitti’s previous experience in Miami.
• This data-driven approach ensures we track progress accurately and adjust our methods to meet our goals.

Leverage the Power of Data

Recognizing that traditional state accountability systems often do not reflect our unique circumstances, we developed our own internal school grading system. This system not only incorporates state assessments but also evaluates factors like chronic absenteeism and student sentiment.

Our goal is for schools to understand their performance metrics clearly, allowing them to target improvements effectively. This rigorous approach has led to significant improvements, including a notable reduction in the number of schools designated as underperforming.

Get Everyone Invested in the Change by Design

To streamline our efforts, we have established common improvement strategies that empower schools to identify and implement effective practices tailored to their specific contexts. These strategies are complemented by a “living playbook”—a dynamic resource that shares best practices and highlights success stories from schools that excel in areas like attendance and academic performance.

Professional development is also a cornerstone of our strategy. It lives partially in a core structure known as “design days,” which are meant for vertical and coordinated co-planning. By organizing design days focused on collective learning, we ensure that every team member—principals, teachers, and support staff—receives targeted training that aligns with our strategic goals.

When we come together, we consider the training that each of these groups will need to implement our strategy.

• As mentioned before, we organize the year into sprints, during which we set goals for what we want to do in professional learning across different groups and roles.
• We write out every objective for every meeting at the beginning so that people know exactly what will happen and what competencies we expect to build.

When thinking about the professional development that will drive the continuous improvement cycle at the school level, we view the principal as a change agent. In this role, principals must have a pulse on all aspects of the continuous improvement process—regardless of which work they may be directly owning—so they can support their team and monitor progress with specificity throughout the year.

Celebrate Success

As we celebrate our achievements, it’s crucial to remain vigilant in our commitment to continuous improvement. Our data systems enable real-time monitoring of student performance, attendance, and instructional quality. This ensures that we can adapt our strategies as needed and keep our focus on effective teaching and learning practices.

One important practice has been highlighting the schools that are doing it well. If there’s a success story of a school that moved chronic absenteeism, of a school that moved their reading data, anything that we can think of a school that engages their families in a way that’s really growing their enrollment, we put their stories in our living playbook. When we come together during Principals Academy, there’s a case study.

When our current superintendent came to Detroit, it was after experiencing years of turmoil, including having a state-appointed emergency manager, large financial deficits, and decreasing enrollment and achievement.

However, recent data shows our progress on state assessments and in closing achievement gaps. We are getting better results than people expect, and we are outperforming improvement across our state.

We’re seeing that happen with the intentional focus on instruction, on teacher professional development, and on our coaching, which is coming together to create alignment and coherence. We’re moving kids through some really tough challenges, and we should be really proud of that.

We have transitioned from multiple schools rated as failing to numerous institutions now recognized for their high performance. This upward trajectory not only reflects our hard work but also reinforces the resilience of Detroit’s educators and students.

Lean on Partners

A critical aspect of our transformation is collaboration with external partners. You can’t do the work alone, and we’ve been really fortunate to work with Leading Educators. They helped us design some of the systems that I talked about, write, coach, train, and all of that.

With Leading Educators, a big focus of the work has been developing principals as instructional leaders. How do you run a successful instructional leadership team? Well, a lot of our principals need support with that, especially if they are seeing themselves as building managers first.

• We have worked with them through Leading Educators on what it means to actually drive instruction, to monitor it, to give teachers support around it, to come back and look at data and how your kids are doing.
• They coached a cadre of principals for us, and they work on professional learning content, and they coach our coaches. 

How the Partnership Originated

More than three years ago, Leading Educators was working with our literacy and math teams on curriculum writing and curriculum development as I was just coming into that fold. When I began to meet with one of the partners on my own vision for how to build leadership capacity, we just started noodling on what that arc of learning could look like. Then, it just developed into an understanding of how Leading Educators does that work in different spaces.

Detroit is unique, and you’ve got to know its context. We do not open our doors easily to people because I think we’ve been burned and scarred a lot. We talk with others, like the publishing companies, who have a product meant for everyone.

Having the chance to customize support the way that we need it to be customized so that our teachers and our leaders are receptive is rare. We don’t find many partners that will make that total bend to what we need. That’s why this relationship with Leading Educators has been so fruitful.”

Looking Ahead

The path to educational excellence in Detroit is paved with challenges, yet our collective determination is reshaping the narrative. As we move forward, we remain committed to fostering an environment where every student can rise and thrive. Through aligned efforts, robust data utilization, and unwavering community support, we are not just transforming schools—we are revitalizing hope and opportunity in Detroit.