Rethinking Leadership: Engaging the Whole Staff in Postsecondary Support | District Framework For Enabling Postsecondary Success

By Ally Levy, Senior Director of College Inquiry and Whole School Partnerships, and Richard Robinson, College Inquiry Coach, at College Access: Research & Action (CARA).

According to the 2022 Learn Together Survey, less than half of high school principals believe that school leaders have a major impact on students’ postsecondary education. In our experience coaching dozens of schools across the country, that couldn’t be further from the truth. While school leaders like principals and assistant principals may not work directly with students on their applications and financial aid, we’ve found that having a school leader who champions postsecondary work is essential. In particular, a skilled leader is needed to create an environment where all staff take on supporting postsecondary access as their own responsibility.

Why schools need a postsecondary access leader

As described in the first three blogs in this series, supporting the college and career paths of all students requires building substantial infrastructure, from comprehensive curriculum in grades nine-12, to expanded counseling capacity and efficient data systems. Because this spans the entire school, we’ve found the process of building this infrastructure needs a leader who has the ability to bring together staff across subject areas and make school-wide decisions about staffing and resource allocation. This means schools should assign an administrator to this role, not a counselor or teacher. A wise strategy, especially at bigger schools where principals’ time is often taken up by other tasks, is to delegate an assistant principal (AP) to lead this work.

However, few administrators learn about postsecondary access during their certification programs, so taking on this role can come with a steep learning curve. The person leading this work needs to be someone who has the commitment and bandwidth to dive into the details and familiarize themselves with both best practices nationally and the specific work happening in their own school. As one leader told us, “when a school leader doesn’t have enough knowledge of the current [postsecondary access] situation, they’re just going to be very reactive.”

Creating infrastructure, not depending on an individual

The postsecondary leader’s most important goal is creating a postsecondary program so robust that it becomes part of a school’s fundamental identity and operations, not something that relies on any one individual. We’ve found two structures are particularly valuable for this: a multi-stakeholder leadership team and whole-school professional development.

Establishing a postsecondary leadership team

A postsecondary leadership team helps guide program development, shares the structure and program materials across grade levels and departments, and reports back on obstacles and progress. At a minimum, this team should include a school leader, the postsecondary counselor(s), and teachers who represent grades 9-12. The leader supports this team by carving out time to meet on a regular basis, providing compensation for this additional work in the form of release time or additional pay, and empowering them to make decisions about how the program will function across grade levels & departments. Building a close-knit team also creates a deep bench of expertise, so key knowledge won’t be lost if a team member leaves. As one principal told us, “My [college counselor] is leaving this summer. …10 years ago I would have been in tears about this loss, but today I’m not. She is just a part of a self-sustaining college-going culture at [my school] that’s successful because of the sum of its parts.”

Bringing the whole school onboard

Students deserve an environment where they can speak with any adult they trust and expect to get accurate, culturally relevant information. Yet, many teachers don’t feel like postsecondary access is their responsibility and their knowledge of postsecondary paths is often based on their personal experience, which may not be up to date or take into account the different backgrounds of their students. An effective postsecondary leader builds buy-in by articulating a vision that inspires staff to take on postsecondary work as part of the mission of their teaching, while fueling that vision with professional development that deepens knowledge of the postsecondary landscape and application process. As one AP told us, “It’s really about having someone who’s willing to prioritize this work. Having my voice say that for PD day, even though we have 50 million other initiatives that the city is rolling out…we’re going to spend even more time on this work. It’s the dedicated, sustained messaging that this work is important.” Leaders can do this in several ways—we’ve seen some principals host whole school retreats focused on college and career access, while others space out smaller PDs across the year. Whatever the approach, it takes consistent messaging and time.

Start small, plan big

In our experience, the process of building sustainable postsecondary access infrastructure takes a school at least three years. Managing such a long process requires starting small enough to build momentum, while having long-term plans ambitious enough to reach the goal of increasing postsecondary matriculation. Leaders we’ve spoken with recommend starting with something that is doable but will feel like a big win, which often means identifying and building on existing strengths. For example, we’ve seen schools in Hawaii and New York (NY) with strong career and technical education programs interweave postsecondary lessons into those classes to jumpstart their programming. At schools with strong advisory programs – like Believe Circle City High School in Indianapolis (IN) and several Outward Bound Schools in New York (NY) – an effective first step has been adding postsecondary lessons and counseling to advisory, drawing on the close-knit relationships that often exist in those spaces. We encourage leadership teams to create an action plan, starting by creating a map of current assets and identifying underutilized instructional spaces that are opportunities for postsecondary access programming.

A final aspect of effective planning is leveraging outside organizations to support the work. Importantly, this doesn’t mean asking an outside organization to run the entire postsecondary curriculum or take on all the counseling work; when that happens, a school risks becoming overly reliant on one organization and the programming is less likely to become part of a school’s core infrastructure. Instead, we’ve seen two main roles outside organizations can play: providing technical assistance to guide schools as they build postsecondary infrastructure and filling in discrete areas of specialized student support, like offering legal services for undocumented students or providing SAT prep. Postsecondary leaders steer this by evaluating the fit of outside organizations and keeping their work aligned with a school’s program.

Making postsecondary leadership a systems-level priority

While school leaders are critical actors within schools, educational systems can do a better job creating the conditions for leaders to be successful. Despite its growing importance, postsecondary access is not included in most school leadership certification programs. Postsecondary planning should be added to leadership training programs and the standards set by national organizations, like ASCD and the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP). Similarly, research finds that district staff have even less knowledge of college and career access than educators in schools. As a result, principals we work with often need to “manage up” to their superintendent to explain their decisions and investments. Greater understanding of the district and state level enabling conditions for effective postsecondary preparation would help district and state administrators be better allies for school leaders.

Supporting the college and career aspirations of every student takes a whole school effort, and no one is more important in championing that endeavor than a committed school leader.

This blog is part of a series of five posts on Rethinking How High Schools Support Postsecondary Access. You can find the other posts below: