Collaborative Edge: How Helping Others Helps You

Teachers might be working significantly more with one another, but principals are not. Superintendents might bring principals together for district meetings or even to expose their performance results to colleagues in public, but principal collaboration is too often trumped by district control. Even worse, more and more schools and their principals are now in direct competition. Schools compete with their neighbors for the most marketable families and their children and for the best teachers and staff. Charter schools compete with all their surrounding public schools for human as well as financial resources. There is an aspect of hypocrisy in school leadership: Teachers collaborate, but principals compete. This is morally and professionally inconsistent. It prevents schools from learning from one another and has a negative effect on student achievement results. It doesn't have to be this way. Schools and their principals should collaborate together--many principals in other high-performing countries already do, and more U.S. principals must follow suit. The authors have been recently studying high-performing systems in education across the world and outside education, too. What they are learning is that one reason organizations perform far above what one might expect is that they have a collaborative edge. They use collaboration to gain extra advantage: an additional push in performance and results. They are also on the leading edge of what actually counts as collaborative practice. In this article, the authors look at four examples. (Contains 1 online resource.)