Why role clarity in schools is a district-level problem
In 2024, our Principal Role Clarity paper explored a challenge many districts face: principals are expected to improve instruction without a shared understanding of what strong instructional leadership looks like—or who, exactly, is responsible for supporting it.
To better understand the problem, we reviewed research and interviewed leaders from 15 school systems. Here’s what we found:
- Competing definitions of instructional leadership: Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers are often working from different ideas about what instructional leadership looks like in practice.
- Wide variation in core instructional activities: Activities like collaborative planning (PLCs), classroom observations and feedback, and data practices looked very different across schools and districts.
- Inconsistent titles and responsibilities for school-based instructional leaders: Titles like “instructional coach,” for example, carried very different responsibilities depending on the school or district.
We found that this lack of coherence often exists across schools in the same district—creating daily friction for principals and teachers and making it harder for schools to improve outcomes for students.
Role clarity for instructional leaders starts with defining teacher support
Last year, we studied four high-performing school systems to understand how they create clear expectations for leaders and coherent support for teachers.
The central offices in these systems treated role clarity as a system-level responsibility, rather than a school-level issue. Instead of asking, “What should principals be doing?” they grounded their work by answering: “What support should every teacher reliably receive?” Only after leaders named, at the system level, the supports every teacher should experience—such as high-quality instructional materials, collaborative planning, and coaching—could they meaningfully define principals’ role in delivering those supports and establish the conditions that make the work possible.
The findings from our Principal Role Clarity paper showed us that even when some systems had defined practices for teacher support, they often lacked adequate expectations for how those practices should play out in schools. The successful systems established a set of nonnegotiables and then marked the boundaries where schools could adapt to their context. The result wasn’t uniformity across schools; it was coherence—different approaches met the same bar because ownership and coordination were explicit.
This is ultimately about empowering principals, not taking away their autonomy. As one system leader put it, principals “are the leader of the team, the person who is responsible for our shared commitments being followed in [each] building.”
Central offices can take work off principals’ plates
Principals want to support strong instruction, but too often they are buried in operational and administrative demands. In the high-performing systems we studied, central offices helped carry the load—taking non-essential work off principals’ plates, aligning messages and supports, and organizing their teams so principals could focus on teaching and learning.
The system leaders we interviewed found it helpful to begin this process with an audit of school leaders’ current responsibilities. Which tasks truly require the principal’s attention—and which could be handled more efficiently at the system level? Identifying opportunities to redistribute operational work and eliminate redundant compliance tasks can protect the time principals need to support instruction.
For example, in some systems, responsibilities like operations, budgeting, and family engagement were moved to the central office. In another district, leaders realized multiple district teams were requesting overlapping data from schools each week. By consolidating requests and shifting data pulls to the central office, they eliminated a steady stream of administrative work for principals.
Before principals can carry out the district’s vision for teacher support, system leaders need to answer a practical question: What specific tasks are coming off principals’ plates—and who owns them now?
By defining expectations, streamlining work, and putting in place district-wide supports (such as shared coaching protocols and ongoing training for school leaders), system leaders can enable principals to focus their time where it matters most: improving instruction.
Learn more
Systemwide Support for Stronger Instruction
When a district aligns around a shared approach to improving instruction, everyone—from district teams to classroom teachers—can move in the same direction, making real, lasting improvement more achievable.
If you’re ready to get started in this work, download our paper Systemwide Support for Stronger Instruction: The Next Step in Principal Role Clarity to learn from:
- Detailed case studies on how high-performing school systems define and organize instructional leadership activities
- An account of how we partnered with a district to implement clear expectations for leaders and coherent support for teachers
- Five practical actions school system leaders can take to define expectations, align support, and sustain instructional leadership
Laken Detchemendy, Senior Director of Custom Strategy
Laken Detchemendy brings deep expertise in instructional improvement with a strong track record of helping LEAs design and implement coherent K–12 initiatives that strengthen teaching and learning. She has led large-scale curriculum and instructional improvement efforts focused on ensuring materials, professional learning, and leadership practices are evidence-based and built for sustained impact. She designs professional learning that builds the capacity of instructional leaders and teachers to translate instructional priorities into consistent, high-quality classroom practice. Her work centers on partnering with leaders to create clear structures, roles, and routines that improve instruction across schools.
