A community engagement manager who gives students a direct say over how her Arizona district spends tens of thousands of dollars.
An executive director of sustainability who helps her students channel their climate change anxiety into tangible action.
A director of family and social services whose experience growing up with a schizophrenic mother informs her empathetic—and effective—approach to absenteeism.
Those are just a few of the district leaders Education Week has recognized in recent years through its annual EdWeek Leaders To Learn From report. The next report will publish in February 2025, with nominations due September 9, 2024. (See below for the nomination form.)
Nominees must be school district leaders. Anyone—teacher, parent, community member, family member, business partner, nonprofit organization, student, vendor, and current or former colleague can submit a nomination.
In the past, the Education Week report has profiled a mix of district leaders, from superintendents and curriculum directors to arts supervisors and food service directors.
The next report will build on a more-than-decade-long tradition of shining a spotlight on some of the most innovative and effective ways leaders around the country are improving students’ academic achievement and well-being, smoothing the transition to college and careers, and bridging yawning equity gaps.
‘Constantly searching for best practices’
John Kuhn, the superintendent of the Mineral Wells Independent school district in rural Texas, nominated Natalie Griffin for her work improving bilingual education, including recruiting and retaining bilingual teachers. Her efforts helped English learners perform on par with, or even better than, their peers who are not still learning English in core content areas like English language arts and math.
Before Griffin took over leadership of the district’s bilingual work, Kuhn said “we were just kind of going through the motions” when it came to that population. Kuhn let Griffin know he wanted these students to be a priority and “she just took my expectations and left me in the dust.”
Kuhn had been looking for ways to lift up her work but found “there’s not enough opportunities to pat people on the back in a meaningful way,” he said.
“As a small town [leader] you do all this hard work and blood, sweat, and tears and you know, you get a paycheck and you get people locally saying, ‘Hey, we like you. We appreciate what you do.’ But [EdWeek Leaders To Learn From is] just a level of attention and celebration” that leaders like Griffin “aren’t used to getting,” Kuhn said.
Terry Grier, a 2015 Leader to Learn From, has nominated two others: Andrew Houlihan and Ben Thigpen, both superintendents in North Carolina.
“It’s one of the premier recognition programs in the country,” Grier said, in part, because it offers takeaways for others. “As a leader, you should constantly be searching for best practices. It might not fit your district exactly the way that someone [has] done it somewhere else. But you might be able to modify it to where it helps you get great results.”
