Skip to main content

About Us


The Ohio Leadership Advisory Council is a partnership between the Buckeye Association of School Administrators and the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. Our goal is to provide educators - no matter their role - with the structures and resources they need to develop shared and effective leadership at every level.

OLAC is an advisory and study group comprised of representatives of key professional associations, business and school board representatives, practitioners in leadership roles, higher education representatives, and state department of education personnel. These distinguished leaders from across the state came together to identify what it means to be a leader and what knowledge and skills it takes to successfully lead.

OLAC's mission is to provide educators with the structures and resources necessary to develop and support effective leadership at every level. The centerpiece of OLAC's work is the Ohio Leadership Development Framework. This framework promotes the use of collaborative structures - district leadership teams (DLTs), building leadership teams (BLTs), and teacher-based teams (TBTs) - to lead schools and share the responsibility for improving student achievement.

Our Beliefs

Based on research about the effective practices that must be in place for districts to make and sustain improvement in instructional practice and student performance, these tenets are reflected in the work of OLAC and are used to guide continuing development of products and services associated with OLAC and OIP.

  1. Leadership is a shared responsibility and needs to be viewed not as a role, but as a set of essential practices directed toward the improvement of instruction with the ultimate aim of increasing students' learning.
  2. Leadership is a process distributed across an entire school system-its central office and all of its buildings-involving shared responsibility for and concerted action on behalf of improved instructional practice and school performance.
  3. Accountability for school improvement requires leadership structures (that is, district leadership teams, building leadership teams, and teacher-based teams) through which personnel take responsibility and hold one another accountable for organizing, implementing, monitoring, and learning from improvement processes.
  4. A collective focus on full and sustained implementation-and monitoring of the degree of implementation-of a few potent yet flexible strategies provides the conditions necessary for school improvement.
  5. The Ohio Improvement Process (OIP)-a structured process based on the use of a connected set of tools for reviewing, analyzing, and basing decisions on relevant data-provides a vehicle for initiating Ohio's Leadership Development Framework in ways that are responsive to stakeholders' insights about local commitments, needs, and assets.
  6. All learning, including teachers' learning of instructional practices, depends on changes in behavior that respond to precise and relevant feedback. Procedures (e.g., routine classroom monitoring) that provide teachers with feedback and support constitute the most powerful way to enable teachers to improve their instructional performance. For professional learning to occur teachers must be deeply engaged in understanding and responding to such feedback and support-not simply trying to comply with external requirements.