Leading Educators

We partner with school systems to build and sustain the conditions, teaching, and leadership to ensure that the students furthest from opportunity succeed in school and in life.

Every day, every student deserves great learning experiences that help them reach their full potential. Since 2008, Leading Educators (LE) has been working shoulder-to-shoulder with schools in New Orleans to create classrooms where every student has an equal opportunity to learn and grow. LE partners with leaders at every level of a school system to design and implement job-embedded professional learning experiences focused on deepening content knowledge, improving content-aligned teaching practices, building equity mindsets, strengthening coaching supports, and building schools' capacities to sustain improvement on their own over time. The goal is that every student engages in grade-level, high-quality, culturally responsive instruction.

Our program maximizes the impacts of having strong classroom teachers with high-quality instructional materials. In New Orleans, after only one school year, students in Leading Educators' partner schools changed their trajectory in math achievement, performing 12 percentile points higher in mathematics on average than those in similar control schools in Louisiana. Our robust assessment of teacher content knowledge shows that teachers move from having lower than or comparable content knowledge, to surpassing national benchmarks in the course of a partnership with Leading Educators. Furthermore, teacher beliefs and mindsets shift from well-intentioned, but harmful beliefs to those which represent higher expectations for all students resulting in significant improvements in achievement, particularly for students of color and low-income students.

New Orleans has become a national hub of progress in education because educators, leaders, and advocates narrowed their focus on the improvement efforts that matter most: investments in strong teaching and learning. Together, we can keep Louisiana rising.

Testimonials

"The training and Cycles of Professional Learning experience is transformational. Students are more engaged and actively learning. I've started videoing my classroom to show teachers that this is really happening. They're flabbergasted. It puts a fire under you to re-deliver what you learned to teachers in a way that's meaningful to them so they can put it into their classrooms." -Rhonda Allmon, Instructional Leader

" New Orleans would not be what it is today had government and 9 philanthropists not made long?term investments in organizations like Teach For America, New Schools for New Orleans, Relay Graduate School of Education, Building Excellent Schools, and Leading Educators, as well as the nation's best pipeline of charter school management organizations, ready to turn around struggling schools." -John White, Superintendent of Education for Louisiana