Without question, excellent schools require excellent leaders. That’s why the Marshall Leadership Institute is committed to developing the transformational school leaders our young people deserve. Now, perhaps more than ever, the nation needs pathways for aspiring school leaders to develop skills for impactful leadership and support for current leaders who experience “trial by fire” that leads to problematic attrition. In fact, four in ten principals are expected to leave their roles in the coming years, according to reports published by the Wallace Foundation in 2022, and there is no significant pool of aspiring leaders prepared to fill these vacancies. This lack of continuity in leadership positions is destabilizing to school communities, especially in those communities that are already underserved.
Enter Marshall Leadership Institute.
What We’re Doing
Spotlight: The Enduring Success of DSST’s Leadership Pipeline
Expanding Impact Nationwide
We facilitate programs that support teachers who are considering leadership, current leaders in the early phase of their career, and experienced leaders who are ready to lead change beyond the walls of a single school. We offer three core programs to nurture emerging leaders, existing school-based leaders, and experienced systems-level leaders. Our programs center the essential skills all leaders need to increase their self-awareness, which serves as the foundational building block for understanding and leading others and creating trusting and inclusive communities.
Our approach is customized for the leaders we serve. We work with charter and district partners to understand their community context, leadership training landscape, school culture, and individual leader needs to design a cohesive leadership program that adapts our model to their community. Since our founding in 2019, we have applied universal concepts of leadership development to the specific contexts of our partners, supporting the leadership journey of 225 leaders at 45 schools across five states.
We also understand that real educational transformation will occur when schools and districts are able to cultivate their own leaders. That’s why we designed all of our programs to develop the capacity of our school partners to sustain their own pipelines of excellent, diverse school leaders. This explicit capacity-building approach has allowed us to accelerate our impact, providing training and development for leaders to meet the urgent needs of our school communities and setting the stage for our partners’ future, enduring success.
Our adaptable problem-based model incorporates a broad base of universal challenges that leaders encounter in their everyday work: inspiring and coaching teachers, guiding them through instructional challenges, and working effectively with families, among others.
Our model also allows us to incorporate the challenges that leaders are facing right now. And those challenges — in the current political and social climate — are certainly historic and daunting:
Our approach provides participants with the theoretical foundation and practical tools to confront the challenges that school leaders face today. For example, 100% of participants in the 2023–24 cohort of our Transformative Leader Fellowship (TLF) — which serves existing school-based charter leaders in Washington state — agreed that the program was instrumental in their professional growth. Participant Courtney Claxton, of Rainier Valley Leadership Academy, credited the TLF with building their individual skills while strengthening relationships among a community of leaders:
“TLF has played such a huge role in my development as a new school leader. Being able to consult with and learn from school leaders who face some of the same challenges as me has been rewarding and beneficial to my growth in so many ways. I also now have a group of experienced leaders I can call on anytime for advice and support. TLF is amazing!” —Courtney Claxton, Rainier Valley Leadership Academy
“TLF has played such a huge role in my development as a new school leader. Being able to consult with and learn from school leaders who face some of the same challenges as me has been rewarding and beneficial to my growth in so many ways. I also now have a group of experienced leaders I can call on anytime for advice and support. TLF is amazing!”
—Courtney Claxton, Rainier Valley Leadership Academy
Our intentional cohort-based learning communities facilitate rich conversations that value diversity and expand the perspectives of all participants.
In addition to creating cohorts that are diverse with respect to experience, geography, and role, we prioritize creating racially diverse cohorts to contribute to a leadership base more reflective of the lived experiences of the global majority. By design, we work closely with schools to ensure our cohorts are intentionally diverse in as many of these categories as possible.
“The human connection elements were the best/most impactful! I have a hard time implementing new ideas while simultaneously executing on currently set priorities. Being able to work in community with such a wide range of professionals who have unique backgrounds, perspectives, and convictions when it comes to doing the right thing for kids is such a rare and special opportunity. I now have a web of thought partners to help me problem-solve in my work and also a support system for my own growth as a school leader. I feel lucky to be part of this group of supportive, smart, skilled, experienced, and humble humans.” —Portia Riedel, Summit Atlas
“The human connection elements were the best/most impactful! I have a hard time implementing new ideas while simultaneously executing on currently set priorities. Being able to work in community with such a wide range of professionals who have unique backgrounds, perspectives, and convictions when it comes to doing the right thing for kids is such a rare and special opportunity. I now have a web of thought partners to help me problem-solve in my work and also a support system for my own growth as a school leader. I feel lucky to be part of this group of supportive, smart, skilled, experienced, and humble humans.”
—Portia Riedel, Summit Atlas
Of the more than 100 leaders served in our Existing Leader cohorts this year, over half are leaders of color. The racial diversity of our leadership cohorts stands in stark contrast to the diversity of leadership in American schools. Whereas more than half of our participants represent the global majority, only about 22% of principals nationwide do the same despite an increasingly diverse student population. This disparity hurts both teachers and students. For example, in schools led by Black principals, Black teachers are more likely to be hired — and with a more diverse teacher population, student outcomes improve in the short and long term.
School leadership is demanding and isolating, especially today. But even before the pandemic and current political and social upheaval, schools in the United States faced retention challenges among school leaders. Annual principal turnover is 18% nationwide and 21% for high-poverty schools. Nearly half of new principals leave their schools after three years. The turnover of effective principals can result in a loss of stability in a school community, greater teacher turnover, and poorer student outcomes. We are proud to say that 93% of school leaders on our Existing Leader pathway were retained for the subsequent school year, starkly contrasting the high rates of leader turnover experienced by most school districts. Additionally, 93% of our Emerging Leader alumni between 2019 and 2023 remain working in education, and 56% of those have moved into formal leadership roles.
One programmatic element that has led to these retention rates is the intentional community we create through discussion, dialogue, and group reflection. We build trust by providing leaders opportunities to visit one another’s school sites to learn and provide feedback.
In addition to these powerful in-person experiences, participants experience 30 hours of synchronous, virtual sessions, 20 hours of site visits and in-person sessions, and approximately 15 hours of independent reflection, reading, and application of learnings to inform our collaborative sessions. One of the most powerful components of our program is the opportunity for leaders to host and engage in school site visits during in-person retreats, which occur twice a year. Through these visits, participants bring the challenges they face at their school sites, fellow participants conduct walk-throughs and observations, and the group provides targeted feedback in a rigorous, structured format. Year over year, participants agree that the site visits and subsequent in-person feedback sessions have fundamentally shaped how they lead. TLF 2023–24 participant Yesenia Barajas highlights the benefits of school visits:
“[I most enjoyed] the opportunity to connect with folks in person and thought partner with them around challenges they are currently facing in the roles. It felt great to be able to be a colleague’s “eyes and ears” in their building in a way that provides them with new insights that they might not otherwise have. This in-person time is so valuable and was the most impactful for me so far this year.” —Yesenia Barajas, Summit Atlas
“[I most enjoyed] the opportunity to connect with folks in person and thought partner with them around challenges they are currently facing in the roles. It felt great to be able to be a colleague’s “eyes and ears” in their building in a way that provides them with new insights that they might not otherwise have. This in-person time is so valuable and was the most impactful for me so far this year.”
—Yesenia Barajas, Summit Atlas
Providing context-specific support and feedback centered on actual observation is one way our program is unique. We value a customized approach, and as an example, have worked closely with the Washington charter sector over the last three years to meet their goal of creating more connected and trusting school communities across the state.
“Before TLF I had spent very little, if any, time with leaders across the sector. This experience allowed me to develop relationships with other leaders. The collaboration and consultation with them has had a direct positive impact on my performance and growth as a school leader.” —Morgen Flowers-Washington, Head of School at Spokane International Academy
“Before TLF I had spent very little, if any, time with leaders across the sector. This experience allowed me to develop relationships with other leaders. The collaboration and consultation with them has had a direct positive impact on my performance and growth as a school leader.”
—Morgen Flowers-Washington, Head of School at Spokane International Academy
As we look to the future and consider the feedback and demand from our participants and partners, we will continue to operate the Transformative Leader Fellowship in Washington and expand our offering to support teachers who are preparing for leadership roles.
By growing our partners’ ability to develop their own leadership pipelines, we broaden the impact of our work. DSST Public Schools — the largest public charter management organization in Colorado and the leading STEM open-enrollment school network in the nation — demonstrates the power of our approach.
A year after the culmination of the DSST-Marshall partnership, DSST continues to build their bench of future leaders by continuing to operate, evolve, and expand upon the foundational work we started. This is the ultimate marker of success — the continuation of a robust leadership development pipeline embedded in the network’s structure and not dependent on an external partner for the long term.
In the year following the Marshall Leadership Institute transition, DSST Director of Leadership Development Fonda Held conveyed gratitude for this success: “Three Emerging Leader Program members have gone through hiring day and been accepted as deans, and another is going through this Friday. The Individual Learning Plan process Marshall introduced has been an integral part in our progress monitoring and my coaching, and it’s been beautiful to see. Thank you again for all of your powerful structures and insights!”
Furthermore, DSST’s leadership pipeline continues to grow — from 12 in 2022–23 and 15 in 2023–24 to an impressive 27 applicants for the 2024–25 DSST Emerging Leaders Program. One hundred percent of participants, who represent a total of 11 unique campuses, have completed the program. Five have moved into leadership vacancies, and many more have taken other teacher-leadership roles, crediting the program with preparing them to lead.
This type of growth is noteworthy and what schools nationwide strive for.
As we look to the future, we are expanding our mission to interrupt the trial-by-fire mode of leadership development and design programs that support leaders at every stage of their careers. Encouraged by the success of our alumni and in response to demand from charter and district leaders, in Spring 2025 we will open our Emerging Leaders pathway to applicants nationwide. This expansion will enable us to cultivate more diverse cohorts of aspiring leaders to build communities grounded in resilience, collaborative problem-solving, and real-time support.