Leslie Hazle Bussey, Ph.D.

Leslie Hazle Bussey, Ph.D.

I believe every child born in our country has a unique and important contribution to make to the advancement of our nation’s community, prosperity, and safety. As a nation, we espouse values of democracy and equity. The journey to ensure those values are translated into reality, for every child and citizen, begins in our school houses. I believe public education is about these “big” ideas, but that those “big” ideas are made up of “small” interactions between individual people: teachers and students, parents, school and district leaders, and community leaders. This is why I believe in the work of GLISI – we keep our eyes fixed on the important “big” work but understand that it begins with building relationships, in particular, relationships between school and district leaders, and the communities of learners in which they participate and serve.

GLISI has a long tradition of looking to research on leadership, organizational change, and school improvement as the backbone of our programs and services. With a terminal degree in educational leadership, I honor that tradition in my day to day work, ensuring that GLISI’s programs continue to be relevant to schools and districts, as well as responsive to new findings emerging from research. My decade of experience conducting evaluation research around leadership development, as well as my work in policy research, allow me to serve as the nexus of research and policy for the organization, filtering important developments on the state and federal policy to our work and districts, while overseeing the evaluation of our impact on Georgia districts and schools. As a former teacher of middle grades students, my perspective is always rooted in the work of the classroom. The ultimate success metric of school improvement and leadership development is whether it enables teachers to meaningfully reach and teach all students.