It is clear to us that transformational leadership is a key ingredient for improving pre-kindergarten through university (P-20) education.

In recent articles, we have stated our commitment to a comprehensive statewide early learning system; an unprecedented capital investment in our schools and university; and urgently needed education workforce development. These commitments, however thoughtful and intentional, will not be met without the fourth commitment to empowering transformational leaders who are willing and able to mobilize teachers and administrators to respond creatively, and not without some discomfort, to an increasingly evident need for change.

According to Pulitzer Prize winner James Burns in his book, "Leadership," "Transforming leadership ... occurs when one or more persons engage with others in such a way that leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation and morality. Their purposes, which might have started out as separate but related ... become fused. (T)ransforming leadership ultimately ... raises the level of human conduct and ethical aspiration of both leader and led, and thus it has a transforming effect on both."

Our schools and colleges must accelerate efforts to prepare, cultivate and support adaptive school leaders capable of initiating and sustaining deep cultural change within their institutions — organizations that have proven to be highly resistant to improvement efforts over the past three decades.

It is clear to us that three factors characterize our failures to improve our schools: First, we have failed to focus on teaching and learning, the core business of schools, tinkering instead with finance, governance and school structures; second, we have underestimated the extent to which schools, as organizations, are resistant to change; and third, we have not understood either the urgency or the approaches we need to take to equip our school leaders to drive the process of transformation.

All too often, our education leaders meet emerging opportunities for change with hesitation and anxiety. This is understandable and must be taken into account: leading for change is fraught with vulnerability. When leadership matters most, the risks are highest.

Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky of Harvard University note that "to lead is to live dangerously, because when leadership counts, when you lead people through difficult change, you challenge what people hold dear — their daily habits, tools, loyalties and ways of thinking" without any assurances that what you are proposing is any better than the status quo.

We know the status quo is not working. We need radically new learning environments in our schools. We need to create schools that have never existed before, with learning outcomes aligned to what students will need to know and be able to do in the 21st century — an adaptive challenge for which leaders must engage the genius of all concerned to create solutions.

An adaptive challenge, as described by Heifetz and Linsky, can only be met with "experiments, new discoveries, and adjustments from numerous places" in the school. And much that is old, or traditional, will have to be given up. There is loss.

School leaders, and we include ourselves in this diagnosis, often find it safer to avoid directly facing the harshness and painful realities of a failing system or organization, instead finding refuge in tried and true "technical" approaches that maintain existing culture and conditions without running the risks associated with deeper change.

Think of it this way: The more urgently needed the change, the greater amount of new learning required — and the more resistant those affected will be — involving greater risk for the school leader. What would you do?

While not a comfortable proposition, the well-being of students and teachers alike now calls for leaders who demand extraordinary efforts, destabilize school cultures, create and manage emotional risks for everyone, bring conflict to the surface and use its energy for the good, and model the change they seek in others.

Heifetz describes "the work of leadership" as containing five components, all of which are mission critical: