Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 1 | The School Leadership Crisis: Have School Principals Been Left Behind? page 2

The Distributed Leadership Perspective:
We Don’t Need Another Hero
While there is general agreement among educators and policymakers about the vital role played by the school principal in establishing strong learning environments, there is also a growing consensus among education experts that in today’s complex, rapidly changing global educational environment, a school leadership model that relies too heavily on one individual may, in fact, no longer make much sense. The professional jargon reflects this changing perception: principals are now “facilitators,” “collaborators,” and “team players.”
One expert, James P. Spillane, professor of human development, social policy and learning science at Northwestern University, has focused on exploring the “distributed leadership” perspective, a model that focuses on “where the world of classroom teaching meets practice.” According to Spillane, perhaps the most important question is “What do people [in the instructional process] do?” What are the routines? Who performs them and why? What purposes do they serve? What are the tools of the trade used in these routines? How do those involved in the instructional process actually make use of textbooks, software, and curriculum? How do the “leaders” and the “followers” and their “situations” interact?

To determine how leadership practice actually works—or does not work—in a given school, Spillane emphasizes that a start-up time of at least six months is required to stand back and observe the instructional practices and interactions in place. Only then, he says, can new routines be designed, specifically tailored to help education practitioners—administrators, teachers, and specialists—to approach their work in more imaginative and productive ways.

A “leadership-plus approach,” he says, which closely monitors routines and structures, requires study of the “how” as well as the “what” of leadership. On the other hand, Spillane regards with skepticism an attitude that fosters hope that a charismatic, heroic leader will magically emerge (he refers to it as the “heroics of the leadership genre”). The distributed leadership perspective does not offer a prescription for developing school leadership, asserts Spillane, rather, it offers “a framework for thinking about leadership differently.” While the principal is a critical member of the leadership team, educational leadership is fundamentally about leadership practice.

Spillane’s work is now part of the Distributed Leadership Study in thirteen Chicago K-5 and K-8 public schools. While NCLB has helped push the school leadership question high on the American education agenda, in the new “flat world” of the twenty-first century, the question of school leadership has emerged as an issue of urgent global concern. Accordingly, Spillane’s distributed leadership research has been getting a great deal of attention in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and China.

Another model that has engendered interest on the part of educators and school administrators is the “shared leadership team,” in which different education professionals share the post of principal, often in sequential multi-week shifts. In 2004, Ralph Carducci, who was the career technical education director for the Monroe public schools, participated in a shared leadership team at Monroe High School in Monroe, Michigan after the school’s principal resigned. All major decisions concerning the school or any problems were considered by the entire team. At the time, he commented that, “It’s a learning process for all of us.” Carducci has since been appointed the school’s principal.

Sandra Stein, CEO, NYC Leadership Academy

Wanted: A New Generation Of Principals
New York City’s vast public school system, with 1.1 million children enrolled in over 1,400 schools, would seem to present both abundant opportunities and a cavernous need for the distributed leadership perspective. Dr. Sandra Stein is the chief executive officer of the NYC Leadership Academy, a $70 million principal preparation program established in January 2003 as a nonprofit organization largely with philanthropic and corporate funding. Stein agrees that distributed leadership is a worthy goal. The Academy, she says, emphasizes with its participants that their goal “should not be to try to be the lone hero of the school, but rather to create a team where leadership is embodied in more than one person.” She notes that she doesn’t believe that “it’s possible for one person to solve the complex challenges faced by many of our schools so that a critical skill of a school leader is the ability to draw on the collective wisdom of the school team in order to move school performance forward.”

That is the goal. In the meantime, until “we have gotten this into the drinking water,” she says, the NYC Leadership Academy is attending to the immediate task at hand: the recruitment, training, and support of a new generation of principals who will form a core leadership focused, above all, on improved instruction and student learning and achievement.

Since 2001-2002, an astounding 730 of New York City’s more than 1,400 principals have left their jobs. In May 2006, The New York Times reported that as recently as 2000 there were more principals over the age of 60 than under the age of 41. By the fall of 2005, there were four times as many principals under the age of 41 as over 60.

In responding to this turnover, the city’s Department of Education found itself facing a dramatically “different attitude toward career,” says Stein. Indeed, she points out, the “lifer” model is an increasingly rare phenomenon and in its place has emerged an increasingly “non-linear view of career.” In the face of this shift in the labor market, the NYC Leadership Academy decided to look to men and women in the system who had at least three years of K-12 teaching experience, who “aspired” to become principals, and who were willing to make a hefty fourteen-month commitment to obtain the necessary leadership training. The three-part Aspiring Principals Program training includes an intensive six-week summer training program, a year’s residency or apprenticeship under the guidance and supervision of an experienced mentor principal, and another intensive summer session during which the aspiring principal develops plans for his or her actual school assignment. Graduates of the program commit to a minimum of five years of service.

The Aspiring Principals Program is “premised on a social justice agenda,” explains Courtney Welsh, executive vice-president for strategic planning at the Leadership Academy. As such, graduates of the program are “hired into the schools that need them most,” says Welsh, adding that “on average,” graduates serving as principals are serving in “lower-performance, high-poverty schools.” In the class of 2005-2006, graduates ranged in age between 26 and 59 with 40 the average age; more than half of the new principals were African-American, Latino, or Asian; and two-thirds were women. In 2005-2006, 94 candidates enrolled in the program, and it is expected that approximately 75 will complete it. All graduates are assigned coaches during their first year of work as principals. “They are getting a lot of on-the-job support,” observes Welsh.

Interest in the program is intense, both at home and abroad. The NYC Leadership Academy has hosted hundreds of visitors and conducted many telephone conferences where participants are encouraged to ask technical questions on “nitty-gritty” issues. Declares Stein, “Anything we can figure out we will give away.”

Some have been critical of the high cost of the program. Starting in 2006-2007, the New York City Department of Education will “[pay] the salaries of people while they are training,” says Stein, pointing out that “[The candidates] are working during their training and making a contribution.” This is just one model, she says, and obviously there are different approaches to addressing the issue of cost.

Building A Hierarchical Team
Still another New York City reform effort aimed at addressing the school leadership crisis is “SAM”—or the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model, a comprehensive school reform model that focuses on developing school leadership teams comprised of the principal and groups of faculty who work in real-life—not simulated—school situations, typically, with groups of struggling students in selected New York City schools. SAM was developed jointly in the spring of 2003 by New Visions for Public Schools, an educational reform organization that focuses on New York City’s public school children, and the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York in collaboration with the NYC Leadership Academy.

“The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model,” explains Constancia Warren, Carnegie Corporation senior program officer and director of the foundation’s Urban High School Initiatives, “grew out of Baruch College’s Aspiring Leaders Program (ALP), designed originally at the request of Anthony Alvarado, former superintendent of Community School District 2, as a way of insuring a good supply of leaders for the school district.” The ALP initiative involved “adapting the business school practice of having students work in teams on case studies, and of having a mandated set of courses and a supported internship,” says Warren. The process of selecting candidates for the program “involved the selection of instructionally excellent candidates by the district, rather than the traditional self-nomination, often by teachers anxious to get out of the classroom.” At the time, she explains, “It was New York City’s most rigorous program for training principals, both because of its curriculum and its selection process.”

Originally designed to train principals for K-8 placements, SAM received an initial grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop and field-test a school leadership program that would address the challenges faced by high school leaders engaged in school reform efforts. Slated for eventual national replication, the program has since received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.

Using the apprenticeship model, SAM provides participants with release time from their job responsibilities to participate in instruction aimed at learning and practicing the skills needed to improve their capacity to lead within their own schools. According to Nell Scharf, lead facilitator for SAM, the program makes use of a pedagogy that is richly “experiential and problem-based.” The program’s components include an introductory four-week summer “intensive,” weekly seminars, daily apprenticeships, monthly “inter-visitations” in which participants visit other schools to broaden their knowledge and understanding, monthly on-site coaching by facilitators who provide individual and team support, and other activities such as reading and assignments organized around specific tasks.

The SAM curriculum was developed by New Visions for Public School staff, university faculty, and participating school administrators with a view to developing “a critical mass” of change agents in the participating schools. The program’s aim is to produce a leadership core that can work independently and in teams, using the same language and sharing the same goals and a common approach. The “scaffolding” effect of SAM is intended to result in a truly distributed leadership and continuity provided by a hierarchical team. The program is currently being field-tested in four high schools.

“SAM has exceeded our expectations,” says Warren. “What we had not anticipated was that these hierarchical teams—each one interning one level above their current position and working on data and problem-solving cases drawn from their own schools—would not only be effective as a way of developing leaders, but would also turn into a model for school improvement.”

Next page: The words—they appear to be the school motto—are imprinted on the masthead of the principal’s weekly newsletter at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia: “Whatever it takes.”

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