Public schools and schools systems, as they are presently constituted, are simply not led in ways that enable them to respond to the increasing demands they face under standardsbased reform. Further, if schools, school systems, and their leaders respond to standards based reforms the way they have responded to other attempts at broad scale reform of public education over the past century, they will fail massively and visibly, with an attendant loss of public confidence and serious consequences for public education. The way out of this problem is through the large scale improvement of instruction, something public education has been unable to do to date, but which is possible with dramatic changes in the way public schools define and practice leadership.