While they can't do everything that needs to be done, they're not powerless, either.

While in San Francisco last week, I had breakfast with Mike Moore. Mike and his wife, Judy True, were both longtime educational leaders in Maine.

Mike was a superintendent of schools in Gorham and York, and Judy was the director of special education for Cumberland-North Yarmouth.

They moved to California to be closer to children. Mike took quite a flyer in agreeing to run the Oakland District for New Leaders for New Schools, a relatively young but fast-growing organization that, as the name suggests, trains new leaders (principals) for largely inner-city schools.

NLNS has been very successful in building a cadre of young, able principals who are engaged in transformational work with their schools.

NLNS now has operations in 10 cities across the country. Its founder, Jon Schnur, was recently named by Forbes Magazine as a “Revolutionary Educator.”

While the best indicator of student achievement is a quality teacher, it is also true, as Bill Gates often observes, that the key to a successful school is its principal.

Good principals recruit, develop and nurture good teachers. This is particularly true in large urban environments where the challenges are magnified by poverty, low aspirations and, often, sub-par teaching.

A good friend of our family, Eric Westendorf, the principal of the E.L. Haynes Charter School in Washington, D.C., is a graduate of the NLNS program.

When he started as an assistant principal at E.L. Haynes three years ago, he already had significant teaching and educational leadership experience, along with degrees from Princeton and Brown and an MBA from Stanford.

In spite of all this preparation, Eric credits the NLNS training as some of the best he has experienced in education.

Each participant commits to remaining in the program for five years so that while the first year is most intense, participants continue to learn and grow on the job through coaching and peer group exchange. This is adult learning at its best.

And the best part of this whole story is that Mike Moore from Maine has just been promoted to the position of chief academic officer of NLNS.

This means he is now responsible for the entire program: recruiting new principal candidates, ensuring that the training remains vital and effective, building a quality staff and taking NLNS to the next level.

The NLNS is thinking hard about the next level. It has been successful in preparing a new generation of school leaders – a group that is now positioned in some of the most difficult schools in the country – and it is making a difference.

The next level is taking excellent schools and figuring out how to replicate their models across an entire school district.

The most obvious reason that it is so difficult to transform a school district is that districts do not give principals the flexibility to build and shape their teaching teams.

Currently, only the charter schools model gives the principal this flexibility. In the normal public school district, union contracts preclude the removal of teachers except in the most egregious situations. That is why the Obama administration is pushing for having teacher assessments tied to measures of student achievement. Teachers’ unions, in general, have been resistant to this approach.

Eric Westendorf will tell you that, with today’s assessment tools, tracking student achievement and linking it to teacher performance is something he does routinely. He does this collaboratively with his teachers. They see their progress and their issues. They have resources to draw on to improve their practice – and most do.

However, if they are not able to be effective at bringing their students up to agreed-upon levels of proficiency, they will likely be looking for work in another school. This can be a tough model – but it delivers wonderful, game-changing results for students.

NLNS, with bright, energetic leaders like Westendorf, has cracked the code on bringing educational achievement to individual inner-city schools.

To bring this kind of achievement to entire districts, NLNS needs the support of teachers unions for more employment flexibility.

There was hope on this front recently as Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed an approach to tracking teacher and student assessment.

The AFT is by far the smaller of the two national teacher unions. Nonetheless, it is the start of an important dialogue, and one on which the future of education reform may hinge.

One thing is sure: Mike Moore is going to be in the middle of the action, and Mike doesn’t give up until he is successful.