A Premium on Principals

Teachers have been the almost exclusive focus of recent efforts to reform America’s schools. But now another person is beginning to share the spotlight: the school principal.

With help from foundations that are putting up $300 million, a wide variety of public and private efforts are underway to develop new strategies to recruit, train and support talented people in a job that has become increasingly demanding and difficult to fill.

The largest private effort--a $150-million, five-year commitment by the Wallace-Reader’s Digest Funds--made its first grants on Monday. Among the recipients will be projects to improve principals’ instructional expertise and to identify ways to make the job more attractive.

Until recently, principals were the neglected middle managers of American public education, despite three decades of research supporting the common-sense notion that good schools require good leaders. They are responsible for everything from the cleanliness of bathrooms to the quality of lessons, yet rarely have the ultimate authority on anything.

Too often their training has consisted of night school lectures on budgeting, school law and procedural issues, leaving many woefully unprepared for the complex task of juggling the competing needs and demands of a school community.

“The principal is the reason the school is the way it is, and it can be toxic and pathological or it can be a profound place for promoting human learning,” said Roland Barth, a Maine-based consultant who has been involved in training principals for 20 years.

Although good teaching is crucial, it flourishes only at schools that are well-run and focused on learning. The Wallace Funds are turning their resources to principals after spending 12 years and $50 million on projects aimed at improving teacher quality. They discovered that their efforts were most effective in schools with strong leadership.

“To grow and be thoughtful about teaching and learning, you need a fellow traveler who can help you dissect your lessons and solve some of the problems you’re experiencing,” said Mary Lee Fitzgerald, head of educational programs for the funds. “Young teachers, who are enthused about teaching, get discouraged when they figure out that they often know more about teaching and learning than the person supervising them.”

Among those investing in the movement are such philanthropic heavyweights as the Ford and Carnegie foundations. A $100-million campaign by the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation is financing research on school principals and is supporting training academies in Sacramento, Seattle and San Diego, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently launched a $100-million campaign to help principals learn to analyze and improve student achievement using computer technology.

“We’ve all come to the conclusion that leadership is absolutely essential, given all the challenges schools face today,” said Tom Vander Ark, who is in charge of education programs for the foundation.

California may not benefit from the Gates money, however, because it hasn’t come up with the required matching funds.

Until recently, most training programs focused largely on management issues. But as schools have changed, many principals have found the training inadequate. Today’s principals are under intense pressure to raise student achievement even as they cope with the multiple needs of a poorer and more multicultural student body, said Michael Usdan, president of the Institute for Educational Leadership.

The job has become so large and overwhelming that training is only part of the solution. The question is, Usdan said, “How do you begin to redefine and reconfigure the role?”

In addition to leading instruction, said Art Hinojosa, principal of Marshall Elementary School in Chino, “I’m a doctor, a psychologist, a custodian, a secretary, a health technician and a crossing guard.”

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz studied 35 new principals, and what they found leaves little doubt that it’s hard and often unrewarding work. The principals reported that they worked an average of 66 hours a week; half of them said they put in 70 to 80 hours per week.

Virtually all reported that they were often overwhelmed in their jobs, and they said they were weakest in handling budgets, managing their time and improving the achievement of low-performing students. On average, only one-fifth of their time was spent on teaching and learning, they said.

A Success Story in Chicago

Chicago’s public schools offer a training program that is light on theory and heavy on the day-to-day juggling of responsibilities that the job requires. The MacArthur Foundation helps the school system finance six weeks of summer classes, internships and mentoring for principals and principal candidates.

Leon Hudnall is principal of Morse Tech on Chicago’s west side, a school with the highest percentage of children in foster homes of any school in the city. His first day on the job, in August 1993, he was greeted by a mess, educational and otherwise. Furniture, student records and books were heaped on the floor of his office, the result of a delayed painting job.

It was downhill from there.

“I knew what I wanted to do, but how to get there, I had no idea,” Hudnall said.

In two years, the school was on probation for poor performance. Closure loomed. Then Hudnall enrolled in the Leadership Initiative for Transformation, where he met weekly with veterans for sessions on how to organize instruction, for example, or soothe an angry parent. He also got one-on-one coaching.

Soon, the demoralized teachers got fired up and began working together. Hudnall made sure teachers at each grade level had time to work with each other. He sent them off to universities for classes.

Now, probation has ended, the school is a spick-and-span showcase instead of an eyesore and teachers line up to work there. Hudnall credits all of it to the training he received.

A bill in the California Legislature, sponsored by Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento), would pick up on one aspect of the Chicago program and provide $4 million to pay for mentors for every new principal in the state. That idea emerged from hearings Steinberg conducted on how to help low-performing schools attract well-trained teachers.

“If we’re going to give new administrators a chance of doing the job right and being as effective as possible, we needed to make sure we have the support systems in place,” Steinberg said.

According to a survey released this spring by two national principals organizations, about half of urban districts already have some type of mentoring for new administrators.

About the same proportion say they also have a formal program for recruiting and preparing principal candidates. This summer, 50 aspiring principals will attend six weeks of classes at UCLA and UC Berkeley, part of a yearlong course aimed at increasing the supply of well-trained administrators statewide.

But many school districts do very little to identify potential administrators. Usually, teachers decide on their own to become principals. Many teachers suspect that those who do so have tired of being in the classroom.

In addition, hiring is often ad hoc and, in the name of local control, left up to panels of teachers and parents. That process, some believe, often results in the selection of weaker, less decisive principals.

The Broad and Carnegie foundations are funding research to determine if the methods used by the military and big business for training leaders can be applied to schools.

In the military, for example, officers progress through a series of assignments. They’re promoted--or not--based on their performance. Big corporations, too, identify talented underlings and then groom them for advancement.

“The investment the military makes in its staff is enormous,” said Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, which is carrying out that research.

For all the apparent enthusiasm for providing principals with better training, not everyone is convinced it’s worth the effort.

Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Assn., the dominant teachers union in the state, said that focusing on principals as they key to a school’s success “is a hideously outmoded concept.”

“They want to get back to the good old days where the idea was that we’ll train all these top-flight people and they’ll be in charge and make all the decisions and teachers will be relegated to the role of field hands carrying out orders,” Johnson said.

But principals, as well as those promoting principal training, say that’s not their intent at all. In fact, they say, the demands of the job are such that to be successful, principals must learn to delegate and to trust teachers.

“I believe all teachers are leaders and that’s what I work hard at,” said Noni Reis, principal of a 730-student school in Watsonville, Calif.

A former coordinator for professional development, she said her job is to be a “buffer for teachers, an advocate for teachers and . . . and to try to protect that classroom so they can raise student achievement.”

Still, “someone has to lead the parade,” said Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals.

Getting Ready for the New Principals

For principals these days, leading the parade means focusing on student achievement. And that means carving out time to spend in classrooms and working directly with teachers. But those other, competing demands won’t disappear.

“We’re asking impossible things of people,” said Jean Brown, who directs the administrator academy in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Brown estimates that 70% of the district’s current principals will reach retirement age in the next five years. To make sure the district will have qualified replacements, it has created a series of intensive training classes for administrators and teachers who want to become principals. Unlike most training today, the new classes are aimed at solving real-life problems the principals will confront immediately.

New principals, for example, must attend 70 hours of classes on how to meet the state’s academic standards for students.

The district is also recognizing that the job is too big for one person.

L.A. Unified has hired 100 assistant principals whose job is to focus on instruction. Eventually, one will be posted at each of 400 elementary schools. In addition, reading coaches will be hired for each of the elementary schools.

“We can tell them to bring up test scores, but if we don’t change something to allow them to do that, it’s not going to happen,” Brown said.