Resourceful Leadership ― Tradeoffs and Tough Decisions on the Road to School Improvement

In Resourceful Leadership, Elizabeth A. City examines decisions about the use of three key resources—time, money, and staff—and how tradeoffs among them are integrated into school leaders’ improvement strategies. She undertakes a detailed study of two small urban high schools in their first year of conversion from a large, comprehensive high school.

Resourceful Leadership is divided into six chapters that present a lively and insightful analysis of school leaders’ dilemmas, decisions, and tradeoffs. Woven through the book is the discussion of additional intangible but essential resources: vision, trust, ideas, energy, and hope. The book offers both the theory behind effective resource use and a practical look at the decisions, tradeoffs, and practices that support it.

“The central thesis of this book,” City writes, “is that resources matter for student achievement, and that school leaders can make decisions about resources that matter.”

Administrators from all kinds of schools—not only small ones—will find this book uniquely valuable as they seek to make strategic use of the resources available to them.

Elizabeth A. City is a senior faculty member at Boston’s School Leadership Institute, where she teachers courses in using data, learning and teaching, and staffing and professional development. City is coeditor of Data Wise: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning (Harvard Education Press, 2005) and coauthor of The Teacher’s Guide to Leading Student-Centered Discussions: Talking about Texts in the Classroom (Corwin Press, 2006).