Better Pay, Training for School Principals Urged

The privately backed school reform group LEARN on Tuesday recommended a plan to improve the quality of Los Angeles school principals by training them in leadership skills, paying them more and removing those who don’t perform.

The proposal, drawn up by five reform-minded principals, calls for the district to spend $33 million more a year on its 900 school leaders, roughly divided between training and salary enhancements.

It contains several unusual ideas, such as dropping the requirement that principals have teaching experience so the district could hire directly from the business world. Another would place all principals on a year-round schedule to keep them on the job during breaks.

LEARN President Mike Roos said the changes are necessary because today’s principals are undertrained and ill-prepared to implement the reforms required to improve student achievement.

“The question today is principal leadership, and everything we do around it is bad and getting worse,” Roos said.

The report was timed in the hope that new school board members, who took office earlier this month, would tackle the difficult issue of principal quality, he said.

School officials and the principals union reacted strongly to Roos’ criticism, saying the reforms he was promoting are already being undertaken by the district, which opened an administrator training academy earlier this year.

“Our reaction to this is that the LEARN organization seems to be a little out of touch with what is going on in the district,” said Brad Sales, spokesman for Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who was out of town. “We’re well on our way to having a principal’s academy.”

The head of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles criticized Roos for keeping the plan under wraps until the Tuesday morning news conference.

“It’s a showboat type of deal,” said President Eli Brent. “It may be very good. We don’t know. It’s the best-kept secret in town.”

Roos acknowledged that he had not shown the plan to board members before announcing it. Board members, who were meeting Tuesday, could not be reached for comment.

LEARN’s proposal for a principal academy was intended to build upon the district’s, not to replace or rival it, Roos said.

“They are training--maybe effectively, maybe not--all the new principals coming into the system and doing absolutely nothing for all the rest,” he said.

Academy director Jean Brown said the $1-million budget will not be enlarged this year, but that plans include comprehensive training for existing principals.

Besides training all current principals, the LEARN plan would embrace a vision of creative and collaborative leadership, Roos said.

The report said today’s principals make decisions in isolation and manage by command and control.

Instead, they should aspire to creative performance, research-based actions and knowledge of best practices, it said.

Critical to the plan would be a set of performance standards with a four-step rating system from exemplary to not effective so that “everyone will know who is a satisfactory principal or an unsatisfactory principal,” said Yvonne Chan, principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center in Pacoima and one of the authors of the report.

The teachers union endorsed the LEARN proposal.

“What we have now are too many career bureaucrats in the principal’s office, just putting in their time until retirement,” said Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles. “Let’s have a more sensible way of recruiting and training school-site management.”

Higuchi said he is not wedded to the current requirement that all principal candidates have five years’ teaching experience.

“All else being equal, I’ll take someone who is a good manager or a good leader over someone who has just been in the classroom for five years,” Higuchi said.

LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) is a nonprofit organization created in 1991 to promote a reform model that includes more school-based authority over budget and principal selection. It is funded by Los Angeles business interests.

About half the district’s schools have adopted LEARN, which brings teachers and parents into the decision-making process.