Wanted: Visionary leader with entrepreneurial instincts. Ability to respond with lighting-like speed to a diverse and demanding clientele, ages three to 83. Must be able to obtain and analyze data, inform strategic planning, inspire passion and achievement in others, and manage budget, personnel and facilities in an era of dwindling resources. Will be held accountable for achievements and failures sometimes related to circumstances beyond your control. Also responsible for mountains of paperwork. Sympathetic ear, boundless energy and sense of humor a plus. Sixty to 70 hours a week, including nights and weekends. Salary commensurate with experience — considerably less than what a corporate CEO takes home.
Who in the world would apply for this job? It’s little wonder that schools nationwide face a growing challenge of recruiting and retaining school principals, or that education journals refer to these professionals as “embattled.”
Ever-increasing accountability at the individual-school level, coupled with shrinking resources, has expanded and dramatically changed the role of principals in the two decades since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its 1983 landmark report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. If the old-school model of principal as building manager and disciplinarian no longer fits the bill, then what — and who — does?
Whether a school is public or private, says Dr. Milli Pierce, director of the Principals’ Center at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, “the principal makes all the difference. That’s the person who keeps the core values alive, keeps people on track and makes it fun, because it’s a difficult job.” These are things good principals have always done, Pierce says, but today only principals with the desire and potential to be very good need apply because every student in every school has to make it. As a society, she says, “we can’t afford it otherwise.”
Any school can hang a sign on the wall that says every child can learn, but only hard data can prove the school is actually making it happen, Pierce believes. “And is that
different for principals (now)?” she asks. “You bet your life it’s different.” The challenge for a principal is not just to get a rise in test scores from a low-performing school, but to ext/files/storyimages/the successes of a high-performing school and, in any school, to bring up the bottom quartile — “because there’s always a bottom quartile.”
To do that, Pierce says, a principal must have courage, wisdom and vision, the recognition that he or she can’t do it all and surely can’t do it alone, and the ability to get a diverse group of constituents, from highly educated adults to high school dropouts, to listen to one another.
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Roles playing: Eastern High School's James Sexton |
Before KERA, and more recent federal standards established by the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, principals “never had to be academic leaders to the point we are now,” Sexton says. While schools have always had to turn out “quality graduates,” today’s “exam schedule . . . is a magnifying glass on each school in the state,” cranking up pressure on principals to foster consistent improvements in student performance or face professional consequences. These can include having students reassigned to different schools or having staff come under outside supervision. Simply put, in the current climate, “you must advance, or change will occur,” says Sexton.
He likens running a school to overseeing a big business, and notes that when it comes to nuts and bolts such as ensuring a safe environment for students and staff, “managing a school is not different than it ever was. You’ve got teenagers who drive, teenagers who are in love and teenagers who don’t want to study.” The new challenge is to consistently advance the academic performance of all students, regardless of ability or predilection. To do so, he says, rather than making unilateral decisions as in the past, a principal must assemble a strong instructional team.
For Sexton, that means recommending the hires of teachers who are not only able to adequately cover the state-required curriculum, but are also inventive and “entrepreneurial,” with the drive to develop courses that challenge students to go beyond the basics. (Principals recomm/files/storyimages/teachers they would like on staff to the superintendent, who typically honors those requests.)
Examples of programs created by innovative teachers at Eastern include biotechnol-ogy, which fits the school’s focus on computers (graduates are required to have two years of technology course credits), and “Law and Justice,” a popular offshoot of an Eastern social-studies class that’s taught by a certified teacher who’s also a retired police officer.
If KERA has created an imperative for principals to inspire improved student performance, it has, in some respects, also made that task more complicated. Where previously academic policies were made administratively from the top down, KERA mandates that many decisions related to curriculum, budget, personnel (including hiring principals) and facilities now be rendered by a school’s site-based decision-making (SBDM) council. The council generally includes three faculty members (elected by their fellow teachers) and two parents (elected by parents of current students) along with the principal. It can be hard to reach consensus this way, but Sexton finds working through the council to be ultimately more productive. The real payoff, he says, is that teachers and parents whose representatives have participated in making decisions t/files/storyimages/to be more willing to support and help implement them. The bottom line for the principal: more support and a better sense that the school is part of the community.
One such site-based decision related to student performance at Eastern is a requirement that students pass courses in sequence, rather then doubling up, say, Algebra 1 and Algebra 2 in a single year to make up a failing grade. This ensures that a student has mastered the basics of a lower-level course before tackling the next level. A student can re-enroll in a failed course after school or during the summer, or make it up online through Jefferson County’s “e-school”; if not, the course must be taken over in the next school year and raise the possibility of the student not graduating on time — always a tough call, but one that has parent and teacher support at Eastern.
Private Issues
The roles of private and parochial school principals have changed along with those of their public school counterparts. Pierce points out that private school principals have always had to be accountable to tuition-paying parents, who typically have high expectations of academic success for their children. And with many private school budgets crunched in the current economic climate, these principals, too, have had to find creative ways to make do with less while trying to bring in more.
Julie Crone is in her first year as principal at Louisville’s Mercy Academy on East Broadway, but served as director of students there for 11 years and as a Mercy teacher for 15 years before that. About three years ago, she says, school officials recognized the need to revamp their administrative model. Michael Johnson, then the principal, was spending increasing time on development issues, particularly once the school purchased 24 acres of land in the Fern Creek area for a projected new building to keep the school competitive and growing (a move to the new location is anticipated within the next five years). As a result, Crone and a fellow assistant principal were becoming more involved with curriculum and instructional issues. Beginning with the current school year, Mercy made the shift in responsibilities official: Johnson assumed the title of president and Crone became principal.
Crone notes that Mercy must meet three different sets of curriculum standards — those required for accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, the pre-college curriculum required by Kentucky colleges and universities, and the religion courses required of all Catholic schools by the Louisville Archdiocese.
With 98 percent of Mercy graduates going on to college, Crone, like her public school colleagues, is also focused on “educating kids who know how to access information and how to evaluate it and integrate it with other knowledge and experience.” To that end, she’s putting increasing emphasis on professional development for teachers, getting them “to re-think what they know about teaching and learning in general.”
Crone adds, “One of the most important things I do is hire good people. The crux of it is whether they can help kids learn. They need to believe they can help kids be successful.”
Principals now have to engage in what Joe Burks, an assistant superintendent in the county’s public schools, calls “high-performance management,” something he notes the corporate world has understood for years. “Principals have had to become strategic planners focused on results,” he says, such as increased attendance and decreased dropout rates. A principal can be good with a budget, facilities management and scheduling, Burks says, but now must also be able to measure effectiveness in these and other areas through student results.
“The principal is no longer the director,” Burks says, “but the leader of other leaders. Somebody has called it being the ‘chief executive learner.’ You need to constantly get better at what you do. Everyone on staff needs to learn continuously.”
Under an effective principal’s leadership, faculty and staff become a “research and development system” that constantly re-evaluates and re-adjusts to get every child to specific standards regardless of background or socioeconomic status. Overwhelming as that task might seem, Burks encourages principals to focus on one or two areas that truly drive proficiency — improving writing skills for all students, for example — and work from there. When Burks goes into schools to evaluate principals, he says, “I don’t care what they’re doing until I know what they’re achieving. I don’t want to know what they’re doing in the kitchen; I want to taste the pudding.”
What drives Tito Castillo, now in his eighth year as principal at Jefferson County’s Fern Creek Traditional High, is “a relentless focus on student learning and the quality of teaching,” as he encourages faculty and staff to “measure, measure, measure at every point in time,” to assess student performance and address weaknesses.
Like Eastern’s Sexton, Castillo is a veteran administrator, having served as assistant principal at Atherton High in the ’70s and ’80s, and as assistant principal at Fern Creek beginning in 1987. In 1996, the year he became principal there, Castillo says statewide standardized test scores put his school among the lowest-achieving high schools in Jefferson County.
At his first meeting with faculty after becoming principal, he leveled with them about the test scores. “This is where we are,” he told the staff. Then he let them know he believed they could work together to create a better learning environment. Castillo urged Fern Creek’s SBDM council to designate the school “traditional” as a way to boost student discipline. He encouraged teachers to work continuously with students who were struggling and to push all kids to take tougher classes as well as to prepare for standardized tests. Beginning in his second year as principal, test scores began to improve enough to put the school in “rewards,” meaning it met or exceeded performance goals and was eligible for cash compensation by the state.
Castillo’s concern about students who were consistently performing among the bottom third of their peers led the school to apply for and receive a remediation grant that pays for a mandatory two-week summer preparatory program at Fern Creek for students with low test results who wish to att/files/storyimages/the school. Many Fern Creek students are also the first in their families who may take the opportunity to go to college, so Castillo hired a former college admissions professional to serve as an advisor to students and parents. And because, like all principals these days, he’s been strapped by shrinking budgets, Castillo urged out of retirement Ted Boehm, the former principal at Male, and asked him to create an alumni association similar to Male’s longstanding, successful organization. Boehm did, and Fern Creek alumni have contributed some $30,000 to date, used to buy new furniture for the library and lights for the football field.
A New Generation
According to Diane Ricciardi, director of administrator recruitment and development for Jefferson County, the district hired 32 new principals among 156 total schools for the 2002-2003 school year. This year, there are 14 new principals on the job. Ricciardi says that 70 percent of the district’s principals, like Castillo and Sexton, could retire today based on years of service — so she heads a team working to develop and nurture the next generation of school leaders through programs that identify promising candidates and allow aspiring principals to work on the job as interns with experienced administrators.
In addition, Jefferson County is one of 12 districts nationwide working with a major grant from the Wallace Foundation, an independent organization established by the founders of Reader’s Digest. The $2.5 million grant funds professional development, mentoring and other programs designed to support principals and other school leaders. It runs through June 2004, and will be renewable then.
Ricciardi says Jefferson County’s public schools emphasize growing their own leaders. One such home-grown principal is Shervita West-Jordan, in her first year at Brandeis Elementary School in western Louisville. She’s a product of Jefferson County’s “Principals for Tomorrow” program as well as internships and mentoring related to running a school. West-Jordan, 31, attended Brandeis herself as an elementary school student in the original building, located a few blocks down Kentucky Street from the current location, and now lives nearby with her own family.
Brandeis, a science and math magnet that draws young students from throughout Jefferson County, is no longer a “neighborhood” school. And West-Jordan represents a new sort of principal, fresh from the front lines of classroom teaching. She taught for five years at Fern Creek Elementary before preparing as an administrator. Her biggest challenge as principal so far, she says, has been finding common ground about what’s best for students among “so many people (who) have so many different views and opinions.” She views the school’s site-based council as an opportunity to keep the conversation going.
“You have parents, communities, teachers who are all wanting something, and you’re having to provide a service — that is what we do, provide a service — but everybody doesn’t always get what they want,” says West-Jordan. “Your role changes from being operational manager, to being instructional leader, to being PR representative, to being the referee.”
But one thing never changes: a principal’s affection for the students. Each afternoon West-Jordan tells all her Brandeis classes over the school’s public address system that “I’m glad you’re here, I look forward to seeing you tomorrow, and I love you.”
