The School Leadership Crisis: Have School Principals been left behind?

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Whatever It Takes
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.” A conversation with the school’s principal, Dr. Mel J. Riddile, named 2006 Met/Life/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year, suggests strongly that it is a motto with muscle and that the man who coined it is a man with a mission.

Upon arriving at J.E.B. Stuart High School nine years ago, Riddile, who holds an earned doctorate in organizational development from Vanderbilt University, saw that attendance was poor. “Kids [didn’t] come to school and they [couldn’t] read,” he says. He wanted to know why and moved quickly to establish some baseline literacy testing. Recalling that he had to get permission from the area superintendent to do the testing, Riddile points out that at that time, such testing—reading assessment of high school students—“sounded odd” to many. Observes Riddile drily, some people said, “Mel turned over a rock.” What he learned from the testing was profoundly disturbing: 74 percent of his students were reading more than three years below grade level.

Riddile held a school “literacy summit” to study the reading assessment data. Acknowledging that all this activity was initially met with resistance by some teachers, he nonetheless moved ahead by establishing a school-wide reading initiative, something that he believed strongly was essential to improving student achievement. Improving student literacy was the key not only to improving student performance on the SOL (Standards of Learning), the Virginia state assessment, and on the SAT, he explains, but to encouraging and empowering students—particularly minority students—to take more upper-level courses. At the same time, he realized that teachers would require instruction if they were to teach reading. As a result, Riddile explains, J.E.B. Stuart High School became “One of the first schools to have a literacy coach to teach teachers.” Today, he says, “All of our teachers are teachers of reading.”

The J.E.B. Stuart High School reading program has become a national model for improving high school literacy and is featured in Creating a Culture of Literacy: A Guide for Middle and High School Principals (National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2005) a publication made possible in part by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“This school had every reason to fail,” says Riddile, noting that students at J.E.B. Stuart High School suffered from the destructive effects of poverty that rob young people of hope and a belief in their own future. Ignoring the dismal odds, the school community, led by their principal, looked at each other and declared, “The bottom line is we’re going to succeed!” Riddile acknowledges that they spent a lot of time on discussion and reflection. “We had to learn as we went along and to pretty much invent the wheel.” Perhaps most important, according to Riddile, the entire school community was unified in their commitment to “working toward a common goal and sharing a common vision.” At J.E.B. Stuart High School, the heart of that vision is the unshakable belief that all students can succeed at learning.

“Our business is to help kids to grow and learn to become responsible adults. It’s about the future of these kids. . . . It’s not about test scores,” says Riddile. The scores are “just evidence.”

Even so, in 1998 it was test score “evidence” that labeled J.E.B. Stuart High as a “failing school.” Today the school is a national model for serving disadvantaged students, named a “Breakthrough High School” by the Gates Foundation and NASSP. The mounting evidence of student achievement that has accumulated in the intervening years, including rising SOL and SAT scores and the introduction of the International Baccalaureate Program, is impressive and can be traced directly to the unwavering commitment of Riddile and his staff to achieving literacy for all their students. The pre- and post-testing of all students, a literacy program led by a literacy coach, job-embedded staff development, a reading lab, and mandatory after-school tutoring for all at-risk students were among the “best practices” that contributed to improved teaching and student learning. In addition, the staff took steps to increase positive interactions between students and adults outside the classroom, including using community agencies to establish on-campus family service programs and providing individual and group counseling and family support. Rising ninth graders are provided a two-week summer program providing instruction in study skills and general orientation; during their freshman year, students are assigned mentors.

“To survive and thrive,” says Riddile, “[students and teachers] had to work together.”
On July 1, 2006, Mel Riddile moved on to lead T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He is confident that the work that he and the J.E.B. Stuart High School community began will be nurtured and advanced by his successor, Pamela Jones, former teacher, department chair, and previously assistant principal at J.E.B. Stuart High School.

When It All Comes Together
When it all comes together—a focus on practice, a commitment to student learning and achievement, cooperation and collaboration between school and school district, and broad community participation—the way is paved for a talented school administrator like Mel Riddile to lead. Experts like Judy Codding, Gerald Tirozzi, James Spillane, and Sandra Stein would be quick to point out that Mel Riddile is hardly alone out there. Despite the formidable problems they face—complex social and economic inequities that stand like huge, immovable boulders in the path of students’ educational achievement—countless skilled, dedicated school principals are not bailing out but have chosen to soldier on in schools throughout America. Like Mel Riddile, these men and women are educators who love their work and love even more the children put in their charge. They tend to work at their tasks as if the future of the republic depended on their efforts—which, of course, it does.

Programs like NISL, the NYC Leadership Academy, and SAM reflect a growing awareness that the creation and nurturing of effective schools in this era of accountability cannot take place without effective instructional leadership, and that the training for such leadership depends on intensive clinical practice and supported internships and mentoring, not a handful of courses taken at night. In the increasingly complex world that students face today, success in the globalizing economy will depend on the level of excellence and depth of training their education has provided them. America’s students and their families—and surely principals themselves—expect no less of those who have taken on the critical task of leading the educational programs that will prepare the nation’s children for their future.

At the same time, as NASSP Executive Director Gerald Tirozzi has pointed out, the school principal cannot be expected to accept exclusive responsibility for student achievement in this era of accountability. Until our nation’s policymakers effectively address the problems of poverty, poor health screening and care, inadequate housing, and unemployment—problems that continue to stand in the way of educational reform—the challenge of producing evidence of “Adequate Yearly Progress” will remain an annual Sisyphean ritual for the nation’s school principals, with continuing catastrophic results for all our children.

Observes Tirozzi, “If accountability is the mantra of the land, why not share the accountability with policymakers, who insist on high achievement yet fashion policies that undermine that goal”?

Anne Grosso De León writes about education.

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