What does it take to build a school leadership pipeline that's actually centered on equity—not just labeled that way? New research shows that it's not just about hiring a diverse slate of candidates. It's about redesigning the systems that prepare, support, and sustain leaders in the first place.
In a recent ISTE ASCD webinar, Promising Practices for the Design and Implementation of Equity-Centered Leader Pathways, Daniella Molle, a qualitative researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, drew on findings from a new report produced through the Wallace Foundation's Equity-Centered Pipeline Initiative (ECPI) that explored how equity can be integrated into district-level practices and strategies.
Molle is the research director of the Comprehensive Leadership for Learning—Equity Centered Leadership project, which has spent several years documenting how eight large urban districts have rebuilt their leadership systems to focus on centering equity. As the initiative, started in 2021, enters its final stretch, the team's findings show what equity-centered leadership development can look like when districts have the time, partners, and permission to experiment.
Portrait of an Equity-Centered Leader
The ECPI invited eight districts—each serving between 50,000 and 100,000 students—to define, in their own terms, what equity-centered leadership means for their community. Rather than importing a definition from a textbook or a neighboring district, most partner districts engaged directly with their communities to shape their vision of leadership. As Molle explained during the webinar, that process does double duty: it makes the definition responsive to what communities actually want from their leaders, and it grounds the work in the specific historical roots of inequity in that place.
When equity work is defined locally, it doesn't live on its own, Molle says—it gets embedded into hiring questions, evaluation criteria, and professional learning, which is how districts sustain the work long after a grant runs out.
When equity work is defined locally, it doesn't live on its own . . . it gets embedded into hiring questions, evaluation criteria, and professional learning.
Six Practices, Two Aims
Across the districts, six practices emerged—three focused on developing leaders, and three focused on building the partnerships and systems that make the work stick.
On the development side, Baltimore City Public Schools built a homegrown, 12-month principal residency program called iLEAD, pairing residents with mentor principals and senior principal coaches. The first cohort—five residents selected from 33 applicants—was fully placed into school leadership roles (four principals, one assistant principal); a second, larger cohort of ten residents (from 58 applicants) is now underway. Other districts built affinity groups for leaders of color and developed a district-specific coaching framework to ensure principal supervisors and coaches were included in conversations about new, equity-focused leadership standards and practices.
On the partnership and sustainability side, Washington, D.C., Public Schools built community panels—made up of parents, students, teachers, and community members—into every principal hire, giving them a real say in who leads their schools. Other districts implemented practices like using university partners for aspiring-leader preparation and to support currently sitting principals, or building leadership academies for racial equity.
What District Leaders Can Learn
Even if a district has limited funding for such initiatives, Molle's advice across every practice she studied offers a great starting point:
Start where the energy is. The district examples showcase leader standards, preparation, hiring, support, supervision, and data systems—there's no required entry point. Districts should start wherever there's already momentum or urgency.
Build in two-way communication. D.C.'s community panels work not because they hand decision making to parents, but because they create a real feedback loop: the district signals who it believes embodies its vision, and the community signals back what it values and what's missing.
Invest in facilitators, not just spaces. In Fresno Unified School District, affinity groups created policy change because the district trained the people running them to encourage open sharing of ideas but also provide structure. "The district did invest very intentionally in building the capacity of the facilitators of the group," Molle said. "Because good conversations don't happen by chance."
Tie leadership development to permanent structures. The most durable practices weren't standalone initiatives. They were stitched into policy, strategic plans, or senior leadership priorities—so the work survives staff turnover and funding cliffs.
Leadership Rooted in Equity
Principal pipelines are often treated as a hiring problem to solve. What this research suggests is something more expansive: that the districts making real progress on equity treat leadership development as a way to link community voice, university partnerships, supervisor coaching, and district policy into one coherent system, always in service of the students furthest from opportunity.
To learn more, read the full report, Promising Practices for the Design and Implementation of Equity-Centered Leader Pathways, and watch the webinar recording.
