The Program

Program Overview

Our greatest national challenge is to ensure all children have access to a quality education. Critical to meeting this challenge is recruiting and training exceptional leaders to raise the bar of student achievement to the highest level. Through our rigorous selection process, intensive training program, and ongoing support, New Leaders for New Schools provides a pathway for current and former educators to become outstanding principals of urban public schools.

Employing a wide range of recruitment strategies and a highly rigorous admissions process, New Leaders identifies and admits outstanding individuals from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives.

Our Selection Criteria are competency-based, and our leaders are outstanding and diverse in every respect. Two-thirds of our leaders are people of color, ranging in age from 26 to 60, and all represent diverse professional backgrounds. United by a common thread of values, expertise, and drive, we continuously recruit and select current and former educators who demonstrate:

An unyielding belief and sense of urgency to ensure all students achieve academically at high levels
A relentless drive to lead an excellent urban public school
Instructional expertise in a K-12 classroom
Exceptional leadership skills
The ability to achieve in the face of obstacles

While all of our leaders have prior teaching experience, half come directly from the school systems with which we partner and half come from outside, representing diverse, successful backgrounds in schools, universities, companies, non-profit organizations, and foundations. Our leaders are:

Veterans of the system who have a record of instructional leadership: teacher leaders, grade-level chairs, school leadership team members, and professional developers
Former teachers who went on to run non-profits and/or for-profits and want to combine their teaching and leadership experiences
Former business and non-profit leaders who became teachers
Young leaders who have demonstrated they can deliver results in a short period of time

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