49 Influential Educational System Leaders to Follow on LinkedIn

Last updated: June 2026

If you lead a school, district, or education system and want to sharpen how you think, the most practical thing you can do right now is review who is actually influencing your LinkedIn feed. The most influential educational system leaders globally are actively posting on LinkedIn in 2026, sharing frameworks, district results, policy positions, and hard-won lessons in formats that a practitioner can use.

As of June 2026, the 49 people on this list represent the clearest thinking on school system leadership available through a single platform. They include sitting superintendents who have just been named national leaders of the year, UK trust leaders shaping the structure of the English education system, Finnish researchers whose work on equity and wellbeing now informs policy on four continents, New Zealand scholars whose evidence on student-centred leadership has been adopted from Singapore to Scandinavia, and practitioner-authors who have sold hundreds of thousands of books to the people actually running schools. Rather than recycling the same handful of names that appear on every list, this directory was built to surface the leaders who are genuinely shaping this field right now.

To work with a practitioner who translates the ideas these leaders champion into team culture and leadership action inside your school or system, contact Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Following Education System Leaders on LinkedIn Actually Matters

The quality of your professional learning is directly tied to the quality of the voices you expose yourself to. School system leaders who follow substantive LinkedIn voices report feeling less isolated and more connected to the challenges their peers are navigating. One practical reason LinkedIn now matters more than most conferences is currency: a system leader can post this week's thinking on AI governance in schools, chronic absenteeism data, or the structural consequences of funding cuts in formats that are immediately searchable, shareable, and commentable. The best voices on this platform are not recycling book content from five years ago. They are thinking aloud in real time about the exact problems that are landing on your desk.

Research consistently places school leadership as the second most powerful in-school influence on student outcomes, behind only classroom instruction. The OECD's Education at a Glance 2025 report documents significant variation in student outcomes that cannot be explained by resourcing alone, pointing instead to the quality of system-level leadership decisions about curriculum, staffing, and culture as critical differentiators. Following the right voices does not substitute for doing the hard work of leadership. It does accelerate your access to the thinking that makes the hard work more effective.

For more on the evidence connecting school system leadership to student outcomes, see the Learning Policy Institute's work at learningpolicyinstitute.org. Jonno White works with school and district leadership teams on the communication, collaboration, and team culture foundations that make strong system leadership possible. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

How This List Was Compiled

Each person on this list was selected on the basis of three criteria: documented contribution to education leadership through published research, active district leadership with recognised results, or senior system-level influence; current or very recent activity in 2025 or 2026; and geographic and disciplinary diversity across the full range of education contexts. The list deliberately moves past the most prominent household names to surface the leaders who genuinely deserve to be just as well known. Every person was verified through primary sources before inclusion.

Award-Winning Practicing District Superintendents

These are the sitting district leaders whose student outcome results and peer recognition have placed them at the national and international frontier of district leadership in 2025 and 2026. Their LinkedIn content is substantive, original, and grounded in the daily reality of leading large public education systems.

1. Roosevelt Nivens

Named the 2026 AASA National Superintendent of the Year by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, Roosevelt Nivens leads Lamar Consolidated Independent School District in Rosenberg, Texas, a rapidly growing district where he has overseen the opening of fifteen new schools since 2021. Enrollment under his leadership has grown by 23 percent, and the district's foundation rests on his belief that no child in his schools should feel the kind of hopelessness he experienced as a student. He wears a "free hugs" t-shirt when visiting campuses, and the practice is less a quirk than a daily statement of what he thinks district leadership is actually for.

His LinkedIn presence reflects his commitment to the relational dimensions of system leadership: regular posts on equity, student outcomes, and what it means to build a district culture where every child's potential is treated as the measure of institutional success. Following Nivens gives any system leader direct access to one of the most recognised district practitioners in the country in the year he earned the profession's highest US honour.

2. Tony B. Watlington Sr.

Tony Watlington leads the School District of Philadelphia as Superintendent, the nation's eighth-largest district with nearly 200,000 students. Named the 2025 Superintendent of the Year by District Administration, he has guided the district to outpace other large urban systems in both mathematics and reading growth in grades three through eight, according to the Education Recovery Scorecard produced by Harvard University and Stanford University.

Before Philadelphia, he served as superintendent of Rowan-Salisbury Schools in North Carolina, where he launched an equity-focused strategic plan and expanded competency-based education. His LinkedIn strategy is deliberate and community-facing: he posts about district partnerships, student achievements, and the practical realities of leading a complex urban system through a period of significant pressure on public school funding and community trust.

3. Sonja Santelises

Sonja Santelises has served as CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools since 2016, making her the longest-serving leader of the district in nearly eighty years. Under her leadership, English Language Arts proficiency has grown by more than 13.6 percentage points, outpacing the statewide gain of 8.9 points, and the district became one of only five large urban systems with higher reading scores than before the pandemic. Her decade of work in Baltimore represents one of the most sustained urban district improvement stories of the past ten years.

She was named the 2026 Maryland Superintendent of the Year and was an AASA National Superintendent of the Year finalist. She steps down from her CEO role at the end of June 2026, and her LinkedIn posts in her final year focus on legacy, transition, and the structural conditions that allow urban district improvement to outlast any single leader.

4. Demetrus Liggins

Demetrus Liggins has led Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, Kentucky, since 2021, guiding Kentucky's second-largest district of more than 42,000 students and a budget exceeding 850 million dollars. He was named the 2026 Kentucky Superintendent of the Year and was an AASA National Superintendent of the Year finalist. His district improvement record spans California, Texas, and Kentucky, including dramatic academic and fiscal turnaround in Greenville ISD prior to his arrival in Lexington.

His LinkedIn posts reflect the complexity of leading a large urban district through budget scrutiny and public accountability, and he writes with rare candour about the relationship between community trust, financial transparency, and the conditions that allow instructional improvement to take hold. His background as a bilingual and dual-language teacher before becoming an administrator gives his perspective on equity and language access a grounding in classroom reality.

5. Heather Perry

Heather Perry has served as Superintendent of the Gorham School Department in Maine for more than two decades, leading a 2,800-student rural district approximately twenty minutes from Portland. An AASA National Superintendent of the Year finalist for 2026, she represents the kind of sustained rural district leadership that rarely surfaces on national lists but matters deeply to the majority of school systems globally that are not large urban districts.

She is a mentor for AASA's Aspiring Superintendents Academy and a regular blogger for the organisation. Her LinkedIn content is practical, accessible, and focused on the challenges specific to leading in smaller systems with fewer resources and higher staff retention pressures. Following her provides a perspective that many rural and regional system leaders will find immediately recognisable.

6. Sonia Goffney

Sonia Goffney serves as Superintendent of Aldine ISD in Texas and was voted the 2025-26 President-Elect of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, becoming the first African American woman to have served as president of the Texas Association of School Administrators. Aldine ISD launched the HEAL school in partnership with Memorial Hermann Hospital and funded by a 250 million dollar Bloomberg Philanthropies grant, giving students a direct pipeline into healthcare careers.

Her LinkedIn presence is active and generous, regularly featuring the achievements of students, teachers, and campus leaders across the Aldine community. She is a powerful voice on equity, community schools, and what it means to lead a diverse urban district with both rigour and care.

7. PJ Caposey

PJ Caposey serves as Superintendent of Oregon Community Unit School District 220 in Illinois and is a former Illinois State Superintendent of the Year. He is the co-author of Student Voice: From Invisible to Invaluable with Nick Polyak and Mike Lubelfeld, a book directly concerned with how system leaders design structures that make student perspective central to school improvement.

His LinkedIn content is among the most original and substantive produced by any sitting superintendent: he writes directly about the political complexity of the superintendent role, the relationship between leadership identity and district outcomes, and the specific strategic decisions that separate high-performing systems from stagnant ones. He is particularly worth following for system leaders who want to hear a practitioner thinking out loud rather than posting curated highlight reels.

For more on building US public school district leadership capacity, see the blog post '50 Essential US Public Education Leaders to Follow' at consultclarity.org/post/50-essential-us-public-education-leaders-to-follow.

US System and Civic Education Leaders

These leaders operate at the intersection of district leadership, policy influence, and civic infrastructure, shaping the conditions in which superintendents work.

8. Russell Booker

Russell Booker led Spartanburg County School District Seven for a decade before stepping into his current role as CEO of the Spartanburg Academic Movement, a cross-sector initiative that has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in public and private resources to advance educational outcomes and economic mobility. He was South Carolina Superintendent of the Year and received the Order of the Palmetto, the state's highest civilian honour. In May 2026, Harvard Graduate School of Education's EdRedesign Lab and the Initiative on Superintendent as Civic Leader named him a Joint Senior Fellow, beginning July 2026.

His model for school system leadership is fundamentally civic: education systems that refuse to let children down cannot be built by school districts working in isolation. His LinkedIn posts reflect this philosophy, connecting K-12 outcomes to housing, health, and community infrastructure in a way that few superintendents anywhere in the world match.

9. Pedro Martinez

Pedro Martinez became Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education in July 2025, following four years as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where he led significant academic recovery work. Before Chicago, he served as superintendent of San Antonio ISD and Washoe County School District in Nevada. Born in Mexico, he is one of the most experienced system-level leaders in the US, having led districts that together serve hundreds of thousands of students across multiple major metropolitan areas.

His LinkedIn presence reflects a career spent navigating the political complexity of large urban districts while maintaining a relentless focus on student outcomes. In his role as Massachusetts Commissioner, he now shapes statewide policy for the entire K-12 system, bringing practitioner credibility to a regulatory function.

10. Scott Muri

Scott Muri served as Superintendent of Spring Branch ISD and Ector County ISD in Texas before moving into his current role as CEO of the ILO Group, where he consults with districts on leadership innovation. He contributed to a widely cited 2026 piece on AI leadership in schools, arguing that the difference between districts that benefit from artificial intelligence and those that become buried in breathless pilots is not the tools they select but how leaders approach the moment of implementation.

His LinkedIn posts are direct and substantive, focused on the strategic decisions system leaders must make in the current environment. He is particularly valuable for superintendents navigating the intersection of AI governance, federal policy uncertainty, and instructional priorities.

11. David R. Schuler

David Schuler became Executive Director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association, in February 2023, bringing twenty-two years of superintendency experience across rural, urban, and suburban settings in two Midwestern states. He was the 2018 AASA National Superintendent of the Year and designed the District 214 Career Pathways program in Illinois, which created over 2,500 work-based learning experiences annually.

As the head of the organisation representing more than 13,000 US school system leaders, his LinkedIn content functions as an indicator of the issues consuming the superintendency in real time: AI integration, teacher workforce challenges, federal funding pressure, and the expanding civic role of the superintendent. Following him gives any international system leader direct access to the centre of the US district leadership ecosystem.

12. Richard Culatta

Richard Culatta leads ISTE+ASCD as CEO, an organisation working across nearly 100 countries to accelerate innovation and equity in learning. Before leading ISTE+ASCD, he served as the first Chief Innovation Officer for the state of Rhode Island and as director of the US Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology under President Obama, where he led the development of the National Education Technology Plan. He is the author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World (Harvard Business Publishing).

His LinkedIn Top Voice status in education, held since 2018, reflects sustained, original content on what responsible AI use in classrooms actually requires. He is particularly useful for system leaders trying to separate substance from hype in the technology-in-education conversation.

13. Cindy Marten

Cindy Marten was appointed Secretary of the Delaware Department of Education in January 2025, following her role as the eleventh US Deputy Secretary of Education in the Biden administration. Before federal service, she served as superintendent of San Diego Unified School District from 2013 to 2021. Her career trajectory from classroom teacher to school leader to state secretary to federal deputy secretary and back to state leadership gives her one of the broadest institutional perspectives of anyone currently operating in US education governance.

Her LinkedIn content reflects her commitment to the conditions that allow effective teaching: teacher preparation, principal development, and the structural decisions at the state level that either support or undermine what happens in classrooms.

US Education Policy, Research, and University Leaders

14. Linda Darling-Hammond

Linda Darling-Hammond serves as Chief Knowledge Officer of the Learning Policy Institute and as President of the California State Board of Education. She is the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at Stanford University and directed the Obama administration's education policy transition team in 2008. She is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books and five hundred articles, received the Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2022, and has served as past president of the American Educational Research Association.

Her LinkedIn posts focus on the structural conditions that produce equitable outcomes: teacher preparation, early childhood education, school funding, and what the evidence actually says about the interventions districts are implementing. For any system leader who wants to connect daily practice to the strongest available evidence base, following her is a starting point rather than a supplement.

15. Elena Silva

Elena Silva became President and CEO of the Learning Policy Institute in April 2025, following Linda Darling-Hammond's transition to Chief Knowledge Officer. She previously served as senior director of education at New America and holds a PhD from UC Berkeley. Under her leadership, LPI continues its work translating education research into policy and practice across teacher workforce, early childhood, school improvement, and equity.

Her LinkedIn presence is active and policy-oriented, focused on the conditions that allow evidence to travel from research institutions into the systems that can act on it. She is a relatively new but rapidly influential voice at the intersection of research and system change.

16. Pedro A. Noguera

Pedro Noguera is the Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education, one of the most prominent education schools in the United States. A sociologist by training, his research focuses on how schools are influenced by social and economic conditions, and he is the author or co-editor of fifteen books. He received the 2025 Transformational Leadership Award from the Dr. Yasmin Davidds Leadership Institute.

His LinkedIn posts address the equity questions that most system leaders find difficult to tackle publicly: the relationship between school outcomes and concentrated poverty, the structural underpinnings of achievement gaps, and the political conditions that make or prevent genuine improvement. He is one of the most credible voices in the US connecting research and system leadership.

17. Brandon Busteed

Brandon Busteed is CEO of BrandEd, a global education company delivering industry-immersive learning through brands including the New York Times, Vogue College of Fashion, and Manchester City Sports Business School. He previously led Gallup's global higher education practice and served as Chief Partnership Officer at Kaplan. A LinkedIn Top Voice in Education since 2018, he has published more than one hundred articles and keynoted more than two hundred conferences.

His particular contribution is connecting global higher education trends to the workforce development questions that every system leader now faces: relevance, employer partnerships, and what it means to design for outcomes rather than credentials. He is among the most globally connected voices at the K-12 and higher education intersection.

18. Barnett Berry

Barnett Berry is a Senior Research Fellow at the Learning Policy Institute and Senior Consultant at the Center for Reimagining Education at the University of Kansas. He founded the Center for Teaching Quality in 1999, which he led for twenty years advancing teacher leadership and equity in public education. He is the co-author, with Michael Matsuda and Michael Fullan, of The Future of Public Education: One District's Journey to Transform Schools and Systems (Corwin, January 2026), a book examining how Anaheim Union High School District moved beyond incremental reform to genuine system transformation.

His body of work, spanning more than one hundred and twenty policy reports and research papers, makes him one of the most practically oriented researchers connecting teacher quality and system leadership. His LinkedIn presence bridges research and practitioner thinking in a way that most academics do not manage.

19. Yong Zhao

Yong Zhao is Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas School of Education and Professorial Fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Health and Education Policy at Victoria University in Australia. His work consistently challenges the dominant metrics of educational success, arguing that systems built around standardised testing suppress the creativity and entrepreneurial capacity that students actually need. He has authored more than thirty books, including World Class Learners (Corwin, 2012). He keynoted Deeper Learning New York 2025 and contributed to a widely read EdTech Digest interview in July 2025 on what AI means for education reform.

He is a genuinely contrarian voice in a field where contrarianism is often performed rather than substantive. His LinkedIn content challenges the assumptions behind the reforms that most system leaders are currently implementing.

20. Ann Lieberman

Ann Lieberman is a Senior Scholar Emerita at Stanford University's Center for Research on the Context of Secondary School Teaching and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more than four decades, she has produced research on teacher learning, professional community, and the conditions that allow excellent teaching to develop and sustain across systems. Her early work with teachers on professional community influenced how the field now understands professional learning networks.

She is a quieter voice than many on this list but represents the kind of deep, cumulative scholarship that the flashier voices on LinkedIn are often drawing on without attribution. Her presence on the platform gives system leaders direct access to foundational thinking.

US Practitioner Authors and Speaker-Educators

21. Joe Sanfelippo

Joe Sanfelippo spent twelve years as Superintendent of the Fall Creek School District in Wisconsin before moving into his current work as an author, speaker, and coach for school and district leaders. He is the co-author of Hacking Leadership (Times 10 Publications, 2016) with Tony Sinanis and the author of Lead From Where You Are (Times 10, 2021). The Fall Creek School District was named an Innovative District twice by the International Center for Leadership in Education during his tenure. He was named the 2019 National Superintendent of the Year by Education Dive and was selected as one of 117 Future Ready Superintendents by the US Department of Education.

His LinkedIn content is among the highest-frequency and most consistently practical produced by any practitioner-author in education: short, direct posts about leadership identity, school culture, and the gap between what leaders say and what they do. His follower base reflects his influence across thousands of school leaders globally.

22. Jimmy Casas

Jimmy Casas spent twenty-two years as a school leader, including fourteen years as principal of Bettendorf High School in Iowa, which was named one of the best high schools in the country three times by Newsweek and US News and World Report. He was named the 2012 Iowa Secondary Principal of the Year and was invited to the White House in 2014 to speak on the Future Ready Schools pledge. He is the author of eleven books, including Culturize: Every Student. Every Day. Whatever It Takes (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2017), which has sold more than 350,000 copies, and The Drip Effect (ConnectEDD, 2025). He also founded ConnectEDD Publishing to help educators become published authors.

His LinkedIn content is daily, consistent, and focused on school culture and leadership character. He is one of the most widely followed practitioner voices in K-12 education on the platform, and the breadth of his books gives system leaders practical frameworks they can use with leadership teams.

23. Michael Matsuda

Michael Matsuda served as Superintendent of the Anaheim Union High School District in California from 2014 until his retirement in late 2025. During his eleven years, the district became a national model for innovation in public education, leading California with seventeen Democracy Schools and developing the AIME programme that created mentorships for more than 10,000 high school students with 120 business and non-profit partners. He was named one of Education Week's twelve national "Leaders to Learn From" within three years of becoming superintendent.

His most recent contribution to system-level thinking is The Future of Public Education: One District's Journey to Transform Schools and Systems (Corwin, January 2026), co-authored with Barnett Berry and Michael Fullan, which AASA Executive Director David Schuler called "breakthrough work" for demonstrating how a district can move from incremental reform to genuine system transformation.

24. Joshua Barnett

Joshua Barnett serves as CEO of the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET), an organisation focused on improving student learning by supporting teacher effectiveness at scale. His LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 are substantive and regular, covering teacher effectiveness frameworks, recognition programmes for high-performing schools, and what system-level accountability structures that actually improve instruction look like in practice.

He brings a practical, school-improvement focus to the teaching quality conversation that complements the more research-oriented voices on this list. His work with districts on teacher evaluation and support systems is directly applicable to the system-level decisions most superintendents are currently navigating.

25. Peter DeWitt

Peter DeWitt is a former school principal who has become one of the most widely read ASCD voices on education leadership. He is the author of multiple books including Coach It Further (Corwin, 2018) and has written the Finding Common Ground blog for Education Week for more than a decade, making him one of the longest-running practitioner commentators in US education.

His LinkedIn content bridges school-level leadership and system-level thinking, frequently engaging with the research on instructional leadership and collaborative learning in formats that principals and superintendents find immediately practical. For school systems wanting to improve the bridge between classroom instruction and district leadership strategy, his work is a consistent and accessible source of practical thinking.

For school systems wanting to improve the bridge between classroom instruction and district leadership strategy, see the '31 Best Leadership Development Experts for Schools' at consultclarity.org/post/leadership-development-experts-schools.

To explore how Jonno White works with school and district leadership teams on Working Genius facilitation, DISC workshops, and executive team offsites, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than school systems expect.

UK Education System Leaders

The United Kingdom's education system is among the most productive sources of global thinking on school improvement, system leadership, and evidence-based teaching. UCL's Institute of Education has ranked first in the world for education for thirteen consecutive years in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026, and the research produced by UK education scholars sits at the forefront of global thinking on how leadership shapes outcomes. The ten voices in this category span school trust leadership, further education, higher education, teacher professional development, and the national policy infrastructure that shapes what happens in English classrooms.

26. Leora Cruddas CBE

Leora Cruddas is the founding Chief Executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, the national organisation and sector body for school trusts in England, and one of the defining voices on civic leadership, multi-academy trust strategy, and trust governance. She has advised successive UK governments and sits on several Department for Education advisory bodies. She was made a CBE in 2022. Her Bridge to the Future thought leadership series has shaped how the English school trust sector understands its civic responsibility and its potential to act as an anchor institution in communities.

Her LinkedIn posts are substantive and policy-oriented, engaging with the structural questions facing the trust system in England: the unfinished reform of a two-tier school system, the professionalism of teaching, and the role that trusts can play in filling civic gaps that other institutions cannot. For any system leader trying to understand how England's school system works and where it is heading, Cruddas is an essential follow.

27. Dame Alison Peacock

Dame Alison Peacock is the founding Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, which represents 42,000 members worldwide as the professional body for the teaching profession in the United Kingdom. Before leading the College, she was Executive Headteacher of The Wroxham School in Hertfordshire. She is an Honorary Fellow of Queens' College Cambridge, a Visiting Professor at Glyndwr University, and a Director of the Edge Foundation.

Her LinkedIn presence focuses on teacher professionalism, CPD quality, and the structural conditions that allow schools to retain and develop excellent teachers. She is particularly worth following for system leaders who believe teacher expertise is the lever they should be pulling hardest on.

28. Becky Francis CBE

Becky Francis is CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, one of the most influential education research organisations in the world, whose Teaching and Learning Toolkit has been consulted by educators in more than eighty countries. She was previously Director of the UCL Institute of Education. Her research background in educational inequality and her current role commissioning and translating large-scale impact research make her the clearest bridge between evidence and system leadership practice in the UK.

Her LinkedIn content is grounded, policy-relevant, and increasingly focused on the system conditions that allow evidence-based practice to spread rather than stall at the classroom door. She is essential reading for any system leader serious about what the research actually says about school improvement.

29. Tom Rees

Tom Rees is CEO of Ambition Institute, one of the most influential teacher and leadership development organisations in England, which has trained tens of thousands of teachers and school leaders. Before Ambition Institute, he was Director of the National Institute of Teaching and served in leadership roles at Teach First. His thinking on what high-quality professional development for system leaders requires is among the most evidence-grounded in the English education sector.

His LinkedIn posts engage with the professional learning infrastructure question that every system leader faces: given that most CPD does not change practice, what does the evidence say about the designs that do? He is particularly valuable for superintendents and trust CEOs trying to build leadership pipelines rather than just fill vacancies.

30. Sam Freedman

Sam Freedman is a former senior official in the UK Department for Education and is now one of the most insightful independent commentators on English education policy. He writes regularly on the structural and political dynamics of the English school system and brings an unusual combination of insider policy knowledge and intellectual independence to his analysis.

His LinkedIn posts engage with the political economy of education reform in ways that most system leaders find difficult to produce publicly but privately find essential. He is one of the clearest thinkers on why education policy so often fails to translate into system change, and why.

31. Steve Munby CBE

Steve Munby served as Chief Executive of the National College for School Leadership in England from 2005 to 2012 and as Chief Executive of the Education Development Trust, an international education charity working in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, from 2012 to 2017. He is now a Visiting Professor at UCL's Institute of Education and a consultant on leadership and system reform. He is the author of Imperfect Leadership (Crown House, 2019), a reflection on what leadership actually looks like when stripped of the performance of confidence.

His LinkedIn content is reflective, internationally informed, and focused on the conditions that allow system improvement to hold over time rather than cycling through reform waves that leave systems exhausted rather than better. He is among the most genuinely experienced system-level thinkers on this list.

32. Sir Steve Taylor

Sir Steve Taylor was knighted in the 2026 New Year's Honours List for services to education. He is CEO of the Cabot Learning Federation, a thirty-five-school academy trust in Somerset, and chair of the Queen Street Group of academy leaders. His knighthood recognised the sustained impact of the Cabot Learning Federation on student outcomes and community life in the communities it serves.

His LinkedIn content focuses on the operational and cultural dimensions of leading a large multi-academy trust: what governance and professional development structures actually look like in a system that is improving, and what system leaders need to think about beyond the data. He is one of the most practically grounded trust CEO voices in England.

33. David Hughes CBE

David Hughes CBE has served as CEO of the Association of Colleges since 2016, making him the most prominent advocacy voice for further education in the United Kingdom. The Association of Colleges represents more than 550 college corporations across England, collectively educating 2.2 million people. He has been at the centre of the policy debates on skills, post-16 education, and the relationship between education systems and workforce development throughout the critical period of post-Brexit reform.

His LinkedIn content connects further education to the macro questions about workforce development, social mobility, and what a fully functioning education system actually requires. He is essential for any system leader who wants to think beyond the K-12 horizon about what education is preparing young people for.

34. Toby Greany

Toby Greany is a Professor at UCL's Institute of Education, where he researches school system reform, district leadership, and the conditions that allow evidence-based improvement to spread at scale. His work specifically examines how system leaders build the middle-tier capacity that allows effective practice to travel between schools, which is one of the most practically relevant research questions in system leadership globally.

His academic papers and LinkedIn posts bridge research and practice in a way that gives system leaders direct access to what the evidence says about the structural and relational conditions that determine whether system improvement happens or stalls.

35. Tom Sherrington

Tom Sherrington is one of the most widely followed education consultants in the UK, best known for Rosenshine's Principles in Action (John Catt, 2019), which has become a foundational text for evidence-based teaching in schools across the English-speaking world. He is a former headteacher and now works globally with schools and systems on curriculum design, evidence-based instruction, and teacher professional development.

His LinkedIn content is the highest signal-to-noise of any practitioner-consultant on this list: specific, grounded in research, and directly applicable to what teachers and leaders do in classrooms. For system leaders trying to build a shared instructional language across a multi-school system, following him is a practical starting point.

Hire Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), to help your leadership team turn the ideas these thinkers champion into shared language and aligned team culture. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

ANZ and Asia-Pacific Education System Leaders

36. Pasi Sahlberg

A Professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Melbourne, Pasi Sahlberg is Finland's most internationally known education commentator. His book Finnish Lessons, published with Teachers College Press in multiple editions, introduced educators globally to a system where teacher autonomy, trust, and minimal standardised testing produced consistently high outcomes. He received the Grawemeyer Award in 2013, one of the most prestigious recognitions in education.

His LinkedIn posts in 2025 and 2026 address Australian enrolment trends, equity in school systems, the conditions that allow schools to thrive, and the specific policy decisions that Finland made that the rest of the world has failed to replicate. His central argument, that wellbeing and learning are not in competition but reinforce each other, is one of the most consequential ideas in contemporary system leadership.

To explore how Jonno White works with school leadership teams on the culture and team dynamics that make strong system leadership possible, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

37. Lisa Rodgers PSM

Lisa Rodgers became CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research in September 2024, following five years as Director General of the Department of Education in Western Australia and earlier roles as CEO of the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership. She holds senior experience in education leadership across the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, having also served as Deputy Secretary in the New Zealand Ministry of Education. She was awarded the Public Service Medal in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours.

Her current role leading ACER gives her a unique position at the intersection of education research and system-level policy across the Asia-Pacific region. Her LinkedIn posts reflect a career spent at the highest levels of both operational school system leadership and the research and accountability infrastructure that supports it.

38. Viviane Robinson

Viviane Robinson is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of Auckland and Academic Director of its Centre for Educational Leadership, and is also a Visiting Professor at University College London. Her research on student-centred leadership identified five dimensions of leadership practice that have the strongest impact on student outcomes, and her work has shaped leadership policy and practice in Singapore, Scandinavia, Chile, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and received the Royal Society of New Zealand's Mason Durie Medal in 2016 for her international contributions to educational leadership research. Her book Student-Centered Leadership (Jossey Bass, 2011) remains among the most evidentially grounded practical texts on school system leadership available anywhere.

39. Pak Tee Ng

Pak Tee Ng is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Education at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, one of the most important voices on educational leadership and school improvement in the Asia-Pacific region. He is the author of Learning from Singapore: The Power of Paradoxes (Routledge, 2017), which examines how Singapore's education system manages to be simultaneously high-achieving and equitable, centrally directed and locally responsive.

His LinkedIn posts address the policy dimensions of system leadership from a perspective that few voices on this list can offer: an insider view of one of the world's highest-performing education systems, combined with genuine international comparative perspective. For any system leader outside Singapore who wants to understand what that system's success actually rests on rather than the simplified version that circulates in leadership conferences, following him is essential.

Canadian and International Education Scholars

40. Michael Fullan OC

Michael Fullan is Professor Emeritus of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and was awarded the Order of Canada in December 2012. He served as Special Policy Adviser to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty from 2003 to 2013 during one of the most significant periods of province-wide school improvement ever recorded. His work on whole-system reform, professional capital, and the moral purpose of schooling has influenced education policy and leadership development on every continent.

He is the co-author of Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School (Teachers College Press, 2012) with Andy Hargreaves, and co-author of The Future of Public Education (Corwin, January 2026) with Michael Matsuda and Barnett Berry. His LinkedIn content reflects his ongoing engagement with what it means to lead educational change at scale, particularly in the AI era.

41. Andy Hargreaves

Andy Hargreaves is a Research Professor at the University of Ottawa and Visiting Professor at the University of Edinburgh. His career has produced some of the most widely cited frameworks in educational change, including the concept of professional capital developed with Michael Fullan, and the leadership from the middle framework. His most recent book, The Making of an Educator (Corwin, 2025), reflects on what he has learned across decades of educational change work.

His LinkedIn posts are intellectually direct and frequently challenge mainstream reform assumptions: the sustainability of teacher professional development, the leadership conditions that produce lasting improvement rather than cyclical exhaustion, and what the evidence says about the gap between policy intention and system reality.

42. Carol Campbell

Carol Campbell is a Professor of Leadership and Educational Change at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on teacher professional development, educational change, and system leadership, and she has been deeply involved in Ontario's education reform efforts. She connects research to practice in the specific context of Canadian public schooling while also contributing to international comparative work on how systems build and sustain improvement capacity.

Her LinkedIn presence is active and focused on the evidence connecting professional learning to system-level outcomes, making her especially valuable for system leaders who want to understand what Canada's record on equity and outcomes actually rests on structurally.

43. George Couros

George Couros is a Canadian educator, speaker, and adjunct instructor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Innovator's Mindset: Empower Learning, Unleash Talent, and Lead a Culture of Creativity (Dave Burgess Consulting, 2015), which has become one of the most widely read books on educational innovation in K-12 leadership globally, and co-author of Innovate Inside the Box: Empowering Learning Through UDL and the Innovator's Mindset (2019, co-authored with Katie Novak).

His LinkedIn content is daily and consistent: short reflections on what innovation, leadership, and learning actually look like in real schools, written with the clarity of someone who has led schools and now works globally with the leaders who run them. He is among the most widely followed practitioner voices in education leadership anywhere.

44. Kenneth Leithwood

Kenneth Leithwood is Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and is one of the most cited school leadership researchers in the world. His work on transformational leadership in schools, distributed leadership, and the effect of school leadership on student outcomes has produced the foundational evidence base that most school leadership development programmes globally now draw on.

His research demonstrates that school leadership explains between five and seven percent of the variation in student learning outcomes across schools, the second largest in-school influence after teaching quality. His ongoing work continues to investigate what specific leadership behaviours produce those outcomes, and his presence on LinkedIn gives system leaders direct access to the researcher most responsible for the evidence underpinning the field.

45. Alma Harris

Alma Harris is a Professor of Leadership in Education and Co-Director of the Centre for International Research on Leadership in Education at Cardiff Metropolitan University, and Professor Emeritus at Swansea University. She has held professorial posts at the University of Warwick, University College London, the University of Malaya, and the University of Bath. She serves as an international adviser to the First Minister of Scotland and has worked in multiple countries supporting change at scale, including serving as a Senior Policy Adviser to the Welsh Government on system-wide reform from 2010 to 2012.

She is co-editor of the School Leadership and Management journal and has published extensively on distributed leadership, system leadership, and the conditions that allow school improvement to sustain beyond individual leaders. Her most recent papers, published in January and March 2026, reflect her ongoing engagement with system leadership in turbulent political environments.

46. Nick Hillman OBE

Nick Hillman is the Director of the Higher Education Policy Institute in the United Kingdom, the independent think tank for higher education that has shaped the policy debate on university funding, access, student experience, and the purpose of tertiary education for two decades. He holds an OBE for services to higher education and brings a rare combination of political experience, as a former special adviser to the Minister for Universities and Science, and intellectual independence to the higher education leadership conversation.

His LinkedIn posts cut through the noise in the UK higher education policy debate with a clarity that system leaders across the tertiary sector consistently find useful. For K-12 system leaders whose schools feed into university systems, his perspective on what universities actually need from the students schools produce is directly relevant.

For more on global thought leaders in secondary education, see '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Secondary Education (2026)' at consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-secondary-education.

Bring Jonno White in to deliver a Working Genius workshop, DISC session, or executive team offsite for your school system. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. Whether virtual or face to face, international travel is often far more affordable than school systems expect.

Global Higher Education and International System Voices

47. Chong-Hao Fu

Chong-Hao Fu is a nationally recognised thought leader at Leading Educators, where he has spent more than twelve years as Chief Program Officer advancing teacher leadership and professional learning in some of the fastest-improving school systems in the United States. His work is focused on what sustainable professional learning looks like when it is built around the teacher teams closest to students, and how system leaders design the conditions for that learning to translate into instructional change.

He is recognised nationally for his thinking on teacher leadership, instructional practice, AI-enabled improvement, and sustainable systems change. His LinkedIn posts reflect the operational complexity of building professional learning systems that actually change practice, not just professional development records.

48. Jal Mehta

Jal Mehta is a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the author of The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling (Oxford University Press, 2013) and In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School (Harvard University Press, 2019, co-authored with Sarah Fine). His research examines why the US education reform project has persistently failed to produce the deep improvements it promises, and what the structural and cultural conditions for genuine learning actually require.

His LinkedIn posts engage with the policy questions that most system leaders are navigating in their daily work: what standards and accountability frameworks actually accomplish, where the evidence points for transformative rather than incremental improvement, and what the research says about the teaching profession and its conditions.

49. Michael Sorrell

Michael Sorrell is President of Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, a historically Black college that he has led through a remarkable institutional transformation since 2007. Under his leadership, Paul Quinn adopted the work college model, replacing its football field with an urban farm and partnering with major employers to create a work-study culture that has produced extraordinary student completion and placement outcomes for a student body that is predominantly low-income. He has been recognised as one of the most innovative presidents in American higher education.

His LinkedIn presence reflects his belief that higher education institutions serving low-income students of colour must radically reimagine themselves rather than slightly improve inherited models. For system leaders at any level who want to see what genuine institutional transformation looks like, following Sorrell is one of the most instructive investments they can make.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

The global space of educational system leadership is far larger than any list of 49 can represent. Among the voices most seriously considered but ultimately not included here are Andreas Schleicher, the OECD's Director of Education and Skills, whose amplification is well beyond the mid-tier focus of this directory but whose OECD work every system leader should engage with directly. Iram Siraj's research on early childhood system design connects to the long-term outcomes that later school leadership is trying to sustain. Diana Ravitch's advocacy for public education in the United States represents a critical counterpoint to the accountability reform tradition that several voices on this list represent. A number of US superintendents working in under-resourced rural districts without significant social media footprints reflect a genuine limitation of any LinkedIn-focused directory: the voices doing the hardest work in the most under-resourced systems are often the least visible on the platform.

Common Mistakes Education System Leaders Make on LinkedIn

The most common mistake is consuming thought leadership without changing practice. Following 49 people on LinkedIn is not the same as improving your system. The gap between reading an idea and implementing it in a district of 20,000 students is bridged not by more scrolling but by structured conversation, coaching, protected implementation time, and a leadership team culture where difficult questions get asked and honestly answered.

Jonno White, author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold) and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, works with school and district leadership teams to build exactly that kind of culture. Email jonno@consultclarity.org.

The second mistake is treating LinkedIn as a source of answers rather than better questions. The best system leaders use the platform to surface challenges they had not named and frameworks they had not considered. They then do the hard work of contextualisation: what does this mean for our district, our community, our teachers, given everything specific to us?

The third mistake is following voices who all agree. A LinkedIn feed where every post reinforces the same set of assumptions is a professional comfort blanket rather than a developmental tool. The tension between Yong Zhao's critique of standardised accountability systems and Linda Darling-Hammond's carefully evidence-based case for accountability reform, between Pasi Sahlberg's advocacy for teacher autonomy and the EEF's commitment to structured evidence, is more useful than a feed that resolves too quickly in one direction.

The fourth mistake is institutional following without personal engagement. The organisations with the largest LinkedIn followings in education (AASA, ISTE+ASCD, Chartered College of Teaching, EEF) are valuable, but the most useful content on the platform comes from the named individuals who are willing to take a position, share a failure, or work through a difficult question in public. The people on this list do that. Follow the people, not just the logos.

The fifth mistake is recency bias. Some of the most important ideas in system leadership were published years ago but have not yet been implemented in most systems. Kenneth Leithwood's research on the specific leadership behaviours that actually move student outcomes is not new, but most district leadership teams have not yet built it into their evaluation and development systems. Andy Hargreaves's work on sustainable leadership from the middle was articulated more than a decade before most systems were ready to act on it. LinkedIn can surface older ideas with renewed urgency, and the best system leaders use it that way.

Practical Guide: How to Build Your System Leadership Feed

Start with one person from each of the geographic clusters on this list. Follow a practitioner and a researcher in parallel on the same topic. Allocate fifteen minutes weekly to reading rather than scrolling: open three posts from people on this list, read them fully, note one question they raise for your system.

Engage rather than observe. Commenting on a post by Roosevelt Nivens or Leora Cruddas is a genuinely available route to a conversation with some of the most thoughtful system leaders in the world. LinkedIn is the only platform where that kind of connection is both searchable and accessible at scale.

For primary school leaders wanting to complement the system-level reading here with voices focused on primary classroom practice, see '50 Essential Thought Leaders in Primary School Education Globally' at consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-primary-school-education-globally.

Build a structured professional learning review. Once a quarter, export your last three months of LinkedIn reading into a document, identify three ideas you encountered, and write one paragraph on what each idea means for a specific decision your system is currently facing. This is the difference between professional learning and professional entertainment.

Organisations that want to translate these ideas into team culture, communication, and leadership alignment can engage Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and host of The Leadership Conversations Podcast (230+ episodes, 150+ countries), to facilitate a workshop, keynote, or executive team offsite. Email jonno@consultclarity.org. The 7 Questions Movement, founded by Jonno White, has connected more than 6,000 leaders globally. International travel is often far more affordable than organisations expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who are the most active superintendents on LinkedIn in 2026?

The most consistently active US superintendents on LinkedIn in 2026 include Roosevelt Nivens of Lamar CISD, Tony Watlington of Philadelphia, Sonia Goffney of Aldine ISD, and PJ Caposey of Oregon CUSD 220. In the UK, Leora Cruddas of the Confederation of School Trusts and Tom Rees of Ambition Institute post substantive original content regularly. Activity levels shift as roles change, so checking each profile directly for recency before following is worthwhile.

What makes educational system leaders worth following on LinkedIn?

The most valuable system leaders on LinkedIn post original thinking rather than resharing others' content, engage with the hard questions their field is grappling with, and write with enough specificity that a reader can apply the idea to a real decision. A superintendent who posts only district achievement announcements is not giving you the thinking behind the results. The best voices give you the thinking.

Which educational system leaders have the most global following?

Pasi Sahlberg, Michael Fullan, Andy Hargreaves, and Yong Zhao have among the broadest international followings, reflecting careers spent working with systems on multiple continents. Richard Culatta of ISTE+ASCD and Brandon Busteed also have genuinely global reach. Among practitioner voices, George Couros and Jimmy Casas have extensive international followings built through books and speaking.

How often should school system leaders post on LinkedIn?

Posting two to three times per week with substantive original content builds a more useful professional network than daily posting of short affirmations. The system leaders on this list who are most worth following tend to post less frequently than the most viral accounts, but every post carries something worth reading.

What topics do the best educational system leaders post about on LinkedIn?

The dominant topics in 2025 and 2026 include AI integration in classrooms and system operations, funding uncertainty and its implications for staffing, teacher retention and pipeline, the science of reading and structured literacy, chronic absenteeism, the mental health and belonging needs of students, and the political pressures on public education. The voices on this list engage with all of these from the perspective of people who are responsible for the decisions, not just the commentary.

Final Thoughts

The 49 people on this list are shaping how education is led at the system level in 2026. Some are leading districts through rapid growth in conditions of federal funding uncertainty. Others are building the research architecture that tells system leaders what the evidence actually says about school improvement. Others are producing the books and frameworks that school leadership teams read before offsites and use to restructure professional development programmes. What they have in common is a willingness to put their thinking on LinkedIn in formats that any system leader anywhere in the world can engage with directly.

Following these voices is a starting point, not a destination. The next step is applying what you read to the specific decisions your system faces: the hire you are about to make, the culture intervention you are uncertain about, the trust conversation that keeps getting deferred. That is where thought leadership becomes system leadership. And that is where the hard work starts.

For school and district leadership teams ready to build the communication, collaboration, and team culture that allows great ideas to take hold, Jonno White, Certified Working Genius Facilitator and author of Step Up or Step Out (10,000+ copies sold), works with education systems globally. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to start the conversation.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, author of Step Up or Step Out, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

The following organisations' research and data were cited in this post: OECD (Education at a Glance 2025), AASA (2026 National Superintendent of the Year programme), Harvard University and Stanford University (Education Recovery Scorecard), Baltimore City Public Schools (district performance data), Education Endowment Foundation (Teaching and Learning Toolkit), UCL Institute of Education (QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026).

Next Read

The people on this list are the strategists and system architects. If your school leadership team is ready to translate what you learn from them into daily practice, team culture, and leadership alignment, the companion read is below.

31 Best Leadership Development Experts for Schools (2026) at consultclarity.org/post/leadership-development-experts-schools. Keep reading.