National Institute for School Leadership (NISL)

Leading High-Performance Systems The National Institute for School Leadership (NISL) is the leading provider of school leadership development supports in the country. NISL partners with schools, districts and state departments of education to provide leaders with the knowledge, skills and tools necessary to design and lead high-performing systems. By preparing leaders to serve as strategic thinkers, instructional leaders and creators of a just, fair and caring culture, NISL strives to create education systems that provide students equitable opportunities for learning and meet the highest standards. NISL is the product of $20 million of R&D studying leadership and adult pedagogy within the best-known business and corporate universities, education programs and military leadership schools, as well as more than 3 decades of research by its parent organization, the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), into identifying the top-performing education systems in the world and translating the common elements of those systems to the American context. All of this is embedded in NISL’s research-based and research-proven supports. Learn more about NISL’s offerings: In 1999, NCEE was asked by Carnegie Corporation, joined by the Broad Foundation, the Stupski Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund, to create a design for a new kind of national organization to train school principals to lead high performing schools. Three years later, NCEE announced the launch of the National Institute for School Leadership. NISL’s Executive Development Program (EDP) is now the most widely used school leadership development program in the country and has trained more than 10,000 school principals in 27 states across the country, with four states adopting NISL as their primary school leadership program. Independent studies by Old Dominion University and Johns Hopkins University have shown that students in schools led by NISL-trained leaders outperformed their peers on state tests in both mathematics and reading at a cost much lower than other leadership development programs. As a result of this demonstrated record of success, in 2015 and 2016, NISL received more than $22 million in competitive grants from the U.S. Department of Education to both expand and validate the EDP and to develop an advanced credentialing system for school principals.