Academy 21: Leadership for 21st Century Education
(formerly the Hawai'i Change Leaders Project)

In 2004, Hawai‘i Department of Education Superintendent Patricia Hamamoto built the first bridge between Hawai‘i public schools and the Harvard Change Leadership Group (CLG). This relationship grew steadily through a partnership of stakeholders deeply committed to the future of Hawai‘i’s public schools and the students they serve. The Hawaiian Educational Council spearheaded the creation of the Hawai‘i Change Leadership Project (HCLP), which began as a nonprofit project in 2005.

After almost five years of extensive design, pilot and demonstration work, the Hawai‘i Change Leadership Project closed its first phase and reopened as Academy 21: Leadership for 21st Century Education, a nonprofit that merges the program offerings and curricula of the HCLP and other leadership in education programs, to continue to contribute to education reform in Hawai‘i. Academy 21 builds on the momentum, discoveries, and lessons learned from the classroom level to the policy level and guides school-based collaborations to positively transform education.

Academy 21 first launched on July 1, 2009 with a mission to develop school leaders who design adaptive and sustainable frameworks that reinvent and transform K-12 education for the purpose of providing students with 21st Century Skills:

* Our guiding belief is that collaborating with school leaders moves leadership and learning from a place of isolation to collaboration, from reaction to purpose and focus, and from compliance to engagement.
*Our uniqueness is that we maximize diverse perspectives to transform schools.
*Our work, and our overall goal, is to support educators to graduate youth ready for college, career and citizenship.

Part of Academy 21’s work seeks to develop a model for practice-embedded leadership development that supports administrators to become instructional leaders. Rather than conducting "business as usual" with a focus on operational issues, we believe school leadership teams need to meet together in new ways, struggle with their own practice together and explore strategies for increasing faculty and student engagement.

Inspiration for building practice-embedded leadership development began with a group of school leaders in South Kona on the Big Island of Hawai’i in 2005 (see "Leading for Change"), and quickly drew interest from Harold K. L. Castle Foundation, which continues to support Academy 21 in its first year of operation. In collaboration with the Hawaiian Educational Council and Academy 21, CLG rolled out a leadership development initiative focused on the "Leadership Practice Community" (LPC), the goal of which is to:


create rigorous continuous collaborative inquiry for the improvement of learning, teaching and instructional leadership at the classroom, school and district levels in order to help all students to meet the new performance standards for learning, work and citizenship in a global knowledge economy.


Local enthusiasm for the LPC grew and, today, Academy 21 works with four Hawai’i Department of Education area complexes, or K-12 feeder patterns, comprising a total of 21 schools. Student populations in these complexes are predominately native Hawaiian. The complexes’ principals, School Renewal Specialists, Complex Area Superintendents, and teacher leaders have formed their own respective LPCs with the aim of developing their leader competencies, creating school and district cultures that support collaboration and engagement for instructional improvement, and addressing conditions so they support the improvement of teaching and learning. Essential to the LPCs evolution, local Academy 21 coaches work closely with CLG to tend to each cohort’s growing edge as a change agent in service of student learning.

LPC participants report substantial and substantive changes to their leadership approach. A formal evaluation measuring the impact of LPCs was launched at the end of 2007, the results of which will be posted on the CLG website by winter 2009. Meanwhile Kamehameha Schools has also provided valuable support for Academy 21 and there is a great deal of interest in expanding Academy 21’s work to additional complexes. As we continue to understand the participants’ challenges and how the Leadership Practice Community is making a difference in their work, we are encouraged by the promise of the LPC as a viable lever in the pursuit of improved student learning.