UW–Madison’s Halverson and Saldaña secure $2 million from Wallace Foundation for equity-centered school leadership research
April 11, 2024 | By Laurel White, School of Education Communications
Rich Halverson, professor and Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education in the Department of Educational Leadership
A new research project led by two School of Education faculty members will develop new ways to measure the process and outcomes of equity-centered leadership in schools.
The project, called Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning – Mapping Equity Indicators (CALL-MEI), is aimed at developing new equity indicators, evidence models, and data tools to measure the process and outcomes of equity-centered leadership in schools. It will be led by Rich Halverson, professor and Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, and Christopher Saldaña, an assistant professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis. The effort recently received a $2 million grant from the Wallace Foundation.
Halverson says the two-year project will seek to provide information that supports deeply important work in American schools.
“As a nation, we urgently need a new generation of school leaders who can create conditions for teaching and learning in schools that support social justice, achievement, and equity,” he says.
Halverson and Saldaña are co-leading the project with Alex Bowers, professor of education leadership at Teachers College, Columbia University.
The project will identify public datasets that can serve as evidence for equity indicators and develop visualization tools for district and school leaders to track the progress of equity-related leadership efforts. As the project proceeds, researchers will work closely with eight school districts across the country to pilot those new methods. The work is based on equity indicators developed by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM).
Saldaña says he is excited about CALL-MEI’s potential to support effective and sustainable change in schools.
“CALL-MEI will bring together powerful tools in data science and the skill and expertise of school leaders to support the opportunities of children to flourish and thrive in K-12 public schools,” Saldaña says.
Bronwyn Bevan, vice president of research at the Wallace Foundation, says the foundation is excited to support an effort to provide powerful new data tools to school leaders.
“By compiling indicators of opportunities to learn as well as achievement, the CALL-MEI project is positioned to be an important resource for addressing systemic barriers in education,” Bevan says.
The project is the latest offshoot of the Comprehensive Assessment of Leadership for Learning (CALL), a first-of-its-kind survey and feedback tool developed at the School of Education. CALL, which first launched in 2009, has made the rare jump from academic research to being offered as a fee-for-service product. Specifically, CALL-MEI builds upon the CALL-Equity Centered Leadership (CALL-ECL) project, an $8.1 million, six-year project to study the design and implementation of district-wide equity-centered principal preparation in eight urban school districts across the United States.
For more information about the CALL-MEI project, please contact Deja Mason at deja.mason@wisc.edu.
