Executive Director - Excellence and Best Practices

Title: Executive Director - Excellence and Best Practices

State Role Title: Education Administrator III

Hiring Range: Commensurate with Experience

Pay Band: 6

Agency: Dept of Ed Central Operations

Location: JAMES MONROE BUILDING

Agency Website: doe.virginia.gov

Recruitment Type: Agency Employee Only - A

Job Duties

The Office of the Superintendent is seeking a strategic leader to serve as a critical leader for the Virginia Department of Education and is responsible for ensuring that proven, results-driven practices and innovations are identified, supported, and scaled to improve student performance, advance academic excellence, accelerate student learning and opportunities, and promote local school success across the Commonwealth.

Advance Proven, Results-Based Practices That Improve Academic Achievement: The leader will work in collaboration across the agency and with stakeholders to identify schools and divisions delivering strong student results and support the replication and scaling of these high-performing practices and models. This role exists to help promote instructional practices rooted in academic rigor, merit, high expectations, and content knowledge leading to measurable gains in student academic outcomes.

Identify and Promote Local Innovation and Replication of Success: In partnership with the Office of Innovation and partnerships like ODU’s Center for Education Opportunity and Innovation, catalogue practical, scalable, and fiscally responsible approaches while making room to support promising new practices in teaching and learning, student engagement, and postsecondary readiness. Identify and support school leaders adapting successful strategies locally, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches. This includes capturing innovative approaches to the new educator workforce, transportation modernization, ways schools are rethinking space and building designs, and more.

Elevate School Performance Spotlights to Scale: This leader will use state and national performance data to identify schools demonstrating high growth, high performance, lowering chronic absenteeism, and/or delivering on student readiness. A critical component is to capture these best practices grounded in objective, comparative data in partnership with the Office for School Performance to help schools use this information to drive improvement.

Advise Policy and Budgetary Decisions Based on Results: This leader will inform policy decisions and resource allocation by highlighting programs, practices, and schools that achieve the greatest return on investment. This role will help advise agency leadership and policymakers on how to streamline efforts and invest meaningfully in what demonstrably works. The leader will help ensure education dollars through the agency are prioritized for programs with a track record of success in advancing academic performance and closing achievement gaps as well as those willing principals and system leaders who want to replicate successful best practices.

Additionally, this position will collaborate with and create connections among multiple offices from operations and educator workforce to student pathways, opportunities and innovation. The executive will serve as the gatherer of best practices for the agency and the go-to location from the field for sharing what works.

Minimum Qualifications

•Knowledge of research-based instructional strategies that demonstrably improve student achievement, especially in core content areas.

•Capable of identifying high-performing models and supporting replication or success scaling. Able to evaluate new ideas critically while favoring scalable, proven, and fiscally responsible practices.

•Expertise in academic assessment systems, growth metrics, and commitment to using data, including disaggregated data, to drive decision-making, continuous improvement and student outcomes.

•Proficient in using data platforms, dashboards, and student performance reports to identify trends and inform decisions.

•Relentless focus on student outcomes, accountability, and impact with a focus on action.

•General understanding of state and federal accountability frameworks (e.g. ESSA, School Performance and Support Frameworks)

•Ability to lead long-term strategic initiatives across agency divisions and offices as well as agency priorities. This includes managing high-level projects and driving results through others.

•Strong written and verbal communication