One of the toughest challenges for any organization is to develop a culture of effective leadership. That is especially true in public education, whose deeply embedded pedagogy often resists change. Many schools — even the successful ones — do things the same old way, missing the opportunity to accomplish more with problem-solving leadership.
This is what drew our attention to the Holdsworth Center, an Austin-based nonprofit education leadership institute and the brainchild of H-E-B chairman and longtime education reformer Charles Butt. The center’s goal is to be an education change agent, not by focusing directly on student achievement, but on the people who have the most significant impact on academic performance: teachers, principals and superintendents.