Preparing the Principals

It was the first day of school, and 200 students waited at their desks.

The lights dimmed. The teacher turned on his PowerPoint computer presentation. Soon he was slogging through the dry minutiae of the Stull teacher evaluation form. It wasn’t exactly a candy-coated lesson.

But these were not bright-faced youngsters who needed to be entertained. They were the principals, assistant principals, deans and counselors who are responsible for educating those children. They convened last week as the inaugural class of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Administrative Academy.

Over the next two years, they will gather twice a month for four hours to bone up on what administrators need to know about a host of topics such as school vision, team building, sexual harassment and school finance.

The academy is an unusual collaboration between the school district and the administrators union. Associated Administrators of Los Angeles designed and runs the program. The district pays the bills and assigns new administrators to attend. In coming years, every district administrator will receive 90 hours of training. They will also have the option of taking an additional 30 hours for credit toward an advanced degree.

At the start of first class last week, union President Eli Brent told the students they were trailblazers.

“We have something that other districts are only thinking about,” Brent said. “We beat Gov. Davis. He was only talking about it. We did it.

Gov. Gray Davis has budgeted $12 million to establish teacher and principal training programs at University of California campuses.

In California, all school administrators are required to have a master’s degree and a credential in school administration. But they start with little experience in the pressures of jobs that require them to be part chief executive, part child psychologist and part instructional leader, said Jean Brown, director of the new academy.

Credential programs tend to be weighted toward operational requirements such as school budgeting and law.

“Most principals receive ample training in administration,” said Ronald Areglado, a training consultant for the National Assn. of Elementary School Principals in Washington. “Where it is truly lacking is in the area of leadership in the instructional plan. If the principal improves his or her capacity to be an instructional leader, the climate of the school will follow suit and student achievement will rise.”

Areglado said that such enterprises are rare, particularly in urban areas. “Historically, the problem has always been time and money,” he said.

Although there are numerous administrator training programs, they are usually voluntary and reach only a small percentage of those in need of training, Areglado said.

The Assn. of California School Administrators runs 24 academies annually, training about 1,000 administrators, the equivalent of one for each school district in the state, said Executive Director Bob Wells. Some districts pay the $2,000 tuition, but more often, those who aspire to become administrators or are seeking a promotion will pay out of their own pockets, Wells said.

The Los Angeles academy is free and mandatory, said Brown, a 29-year veteran of the district who was an elementary-level principal for 10 years before going into staff development. Enrollees are relieved of a portion of their workday to attend.

About 400 district administrators began the training last week at locations downtown, in the San Fernando Valley and in the South Bay.

Every employee who has assumed an administrative job since July 1996 was required to attend.

Brown said a new session will begin in April and others will be held whenever needed to keep up with hiring and promotion that will produce 100 to 150 new administrators per year. “Our goal is to get them as soon as they start on the job,” Brown said, “then to look at preparation before they start the job.

For the group at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce building downtown, the first day was devoted to the nuts and bolts of staff evaluation, good and bad.

“The first purpose of evaluation is to improve the teacher,” said instructor John Lade, a coordinator with the district’s staff relations office.

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Not surprisingly, some of the more compelling moments of the lecture concerned the handling of those who do not improve. Lade and his partner, Albert Fasani, regaled the audience with “war stories,” like the one about the assistant principal who wrote a glowing letter for a bad teacher, hoping he would use it to get a job somewhere else.

And then there was the teacher who had shuffled through eight campuses in eight years. Along the way, the principal at his third school had made him teach physical education because he was not succeeding as a business teacher. “It worked for that principal, but five other principals are going to have to pay the price,” Lade said.

“Before we can terminate that employee, we have to put that person back in a class he is credentialed to teach,” he said.

In written evaluations of the session, Fasani said, some of the class said they needed more help working with inexperienced teachers in the classroom.

Areglado said he considers instruction the most important element in training administrators. He said it should include the theory of how children learn, methodology to make the theory come alive and the use of assessment techniques to measure success.

Brown, director of the academy, said it will concentrate on instruction to a greater extent than the typical university administrator curriculum, partly by helping administrators with strategies for finding time to guide instruction.

“There are so many operational details that administrators have to focus on that it’s hard to do,” Brown said.