Leadership Week, Day 1: How To Improve the Principalship

As someone in a school administration program the December 12th edition of Education Week was an early Christmas present, because there are four superior articles on how the role of the principal is changing and what that will mean for the schools that must change as well. I thought it’d be neat to look at one article a day this week, because there’s that much good content to be found.

Leading off is “How States Can Build Leadership Systems,” by David Spense and Gene Bottoms of the Southern Regional Education Board. They’ve written an article on how states can improve the principal pipeline for themselves, and there’s some very good suggestions to be found:

• Be more precise about expectations for good leaders. The administration class that I had this fall was my first exposure to the ISLLC standards; they’re nice enough on their face, but they don’t tell you a whole heck of a lot about what it really means to be a principal. The fine print of a job announcement for a principal position would be a good place to start, if you’re interested in refining what it really means to be a school leader, because there you’ll find 20 or more bullet points about what’s expected.
  
  
• Be more selective about principal-candidates. The point they’re making here is that pretty much anyone can get into an administrative program. The article goes on to say that about half of principal program graduates never use the credential; for them, it was a path to a pay bump and nothing more. That seems odd to me when there are so many different master’s degree programs out there, but so be it.
  
  The article recommends that the schools and universities act as a sort of dual filter; encouraging great teachers to think about taking a step up on one end, putting them through a meaningful, rigorous program at the other. It’s a nice theory; I’d be interested to actually see it in action. Teachers College at Columbia University is a far, far different place than Central Washington University, after all.
  
  
• Ensure that university-based leadership programs improve. I’m spoiled, because Eastern has a superior administrative program. Here the authors say that many principal programs are mired in thinking that worked 50 years ago, that the classes needed often aren’t the classes taught, and what is taught is usable only in the most general sense.
  
  
• Help aspiring principals learn on the job. One of the problems they list isn’t really a problem at all, to my mind:
  
  Unfortunately, many principal preparation programs provide internships in name only. They allow interns to choose their own mentors and schools for their internship sites. Many programs also fail to provide trained mentors who can expertly demonstrate competence and coach others to meet the state’s leadership standards.
  
  Incredibly, one principal testified at an SREB conference on school leadership last year that her internship in graduate school had consisted of her collecting tickets at a high school football game!
  
  Number one, I call shenanigans. Is it possible that a principal intern might have collected tickets at a football game? Sure, just like if I’m able to do my internship next year it’s possible that I’ll be setting up bleachers for assemblies, wiping down tables in the lunchroom, and passing out band-aids in the nurses office, because that’s what the principal sometimes has to do. The football game story is an anecdote, nothing more.
  
  Number two, the reasons most interns choose the site of their internship is because they choose their work site. How else would you have them do it? It’s a very small subset of potential candidates who could afford to take a year off on a lark; is that what’s being suggested, here?
  
  
• Require more of beginning and veteran principals. Adding more rigor to the licensure process is the key, says the article. By requiring more proof of leadership ability and asking a principal to do more to keep their administrative certificate valid, the thought is that you’ll have better leaders.
  
  Ugh, ugh, ugh. This reeks of ProCert, the back-asswards process that teachers have to go through to keep their certificate, and the reasons that I wouldn’t want that for principals are much the same:
  
  
  • A principal jumping through hoops to keep their certificate is a principal spending less time with their school and their family.
    
  • Principals are at-will employees. Don’t like the performance? Can ‘em. Want them to attend workshops to get better? Dictate that struggling principals do so. Do not, however, punish good principals with more tedium just to fix a few bad apples.
    
  • If you make it too hard, you’re going to drive good people out of the profession. That doesn’t benefit anyone.
  
  
  Tomorrow’s article talks about voluntary national standards for principals, so this conversation will continue.
  
  
• Build better ways to find the leaders schools need. It’s the John Sanford model; provide ways for great leaders in other fields to come to the principalship, and train them up on the instructional piece on the fly. I don’t think that you can teach someone to be an instructional leader if they’ve never instructed, so this worries me.
  
  And finally,
  
  
• Provide stronger leadership for traditionally low-performing schools. One of the correlates of highly effective schools is the presence of a strong leader, which makes sense. The difficulty arises from what it would take to attract your best leaders to your neediest schools—more power and more pay. The second is an easy one to work around; the first, given the realities of collective bargaining and school politics, is much harder.

Leadership week continues tomorrow.