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June 30-July 6, 2000
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Updated 5:00 p.m. PDT
By RICHARD LEE COLVIN,
Times Education Writer
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.
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