From Promise to Practice: Optimizing a Graduate Leadership Program for Cohesion and Impact

Abstract

Bank Street College of Education, a progressive institution in New York City, partners with New Leaders to co-lead the National Aspiring Principals Fellowship®, a hybrid leadership development program for educators across the U.S. While the Fellowship has expanded rapidly and aligns with Bank Street’s mission to promote equity in education, the organization faces challenges in defining and measuring success across its leadership programs. The absence of a shared, stakeholder-informed definition of success limits program coherence, complicates evaluation, and affects alignment with accrediting bodies and partner expectations. This capstone project explores how Bank Street and its stakeholders—faculty, participants, alumni, and partner organizations—define success, which program components foster meaningful leadership development, and what contextual barriers hinder outcomes. The team used a mixed methods approach grounded in the EvaluLEAD framework, which considers episodic, developmental, and transformative results across individual and organizational domains. Data sources included interviews with staff, focus groups with students, alumni, faculty, and partners, and surveys administered to alumni and current participants. Findings indicate that practicum experiences, mentorship, and peer collaboration serve as catalysts for developmental and transformative growth. However, barriers such as disjointed communication, inconsistent course delivery, unclear expectations, and administrative inefficiencies disrupt the learning environment and hinder participants' ability to fully engage. Stakeholders and participants largely align in their aspirations for the program, valuing equity-centered, practice-based leadership development. Yet misalignments persist between what is measured and what matters most to those involved. To address these challenges, the team proposed three primary recommendations: (1) establish a centralized communication hub to streamline information sharing, (2) develop a graduate success profile to articulate a clear vision of leadership outcomes, and (3) create a logic model to enhance alignment across curriculum, instruction, and evaluation practices. Together, these strategies aim to strengthen Bank Street’s leadership development programs by improving clarity, coherence, and consistency—while remaining grounded in the institution’s progressive mission.