by Anne Grosso De León

Into the room the principal escorts the Staten Island Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Martin Wolfson. They don’t acknowledge my existence. They don’t apologize for interrupting the class. They walk up and down the aisles, peering at student papers. They pick them up for a closer look. Superintendent shows one to the principal. Superintendent frowns and purses his lips. Principal purses his lips. Class understands these are significant and important people. To show loyalty and solidarity they refrain from asking for the pass.

Frank McCourt
Teacher Man: A Memoir
(Scribner, 2005)


The kabuki-like drama described by Frank McCourt in his memoir, Teacher Man, which chronicles his thirty-year teaching career in New York City’s public high schools, unfolded more than forty years ago. Even so, to all who have ever studied or taught in an American school, the drama is disconcertingly familiar. In a flash we are all anxiously on guard. Who doesn’t remember vividly the day on which the school principal made an unannounced classroom visit to “observe”—occasionally with an even higher official in tow? It was invariably a day that put everybody on edge. Students visualized detentions for their lack of preparation. Teachers visualized unfavorable letters in their files for having such embarrassingly unprepared students. What McCourt suggests, but does not say explicitly, is that the lip-pursing principal, who typically did not have the faintest idea of what McCourt might be doing in his English class that day, was also clearly on edge. As poor Principal Wolfson mimicked the superintendent’s movements and expressions, he kept a close eye on the superintendent anxiously trying to divine whether disaster or success lay in his immediate future. The scene is as poignant as it is comical.

How “significant and important” a person can this principal be?

The answer to this question is as befuddling today as it was forty years ago. By definition, the principal—as the school’s highest-ranking official—is indeed “a significant and important” person. Yet the metaphors currently being used by experts to describe the plight of the nation’s school principals—“exposed,” “deer caught in the headlights,” “in the hot seat,” “in a vise,” “in the eye of a storm,” to name a few—are deeply troubling. How on earth did the job of principal come to be seen in the alarming way it is today? Moreover, why do school principals feel so besieged?

Some would argue that the educational reform movement of the past two decades, culminating in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, has moved American education into an era of high accountability with heightened expectations regarding student achievement and learning—and with serious penalties for schools that fail to perform. “As No Child Left Behind has moved America’s schools into an era of accountability,” says Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, “the focus of American education has been on testing. The focus, however, must and will change to performance and leadership if the goal of creating effective schools in America is to be realized.” Above all, says Gregorian, “It is the principal as instructional leader who is crucial to the effectiveness of the nation’s nearly 96,000 schools.”

Alas, the critical role of instructional leader is only one of a dizzying array of roles the school principal is required to play in today’s educational environment. According to a recent study on school leadership published by the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute with support from the Wallace Foundation, “. . .[T]he role of principal has swelled to include a staggering array of professional tasks and competencies. Principals are expected to be educational visionaries, instructional and curriculum leaders, assessment experts, disciplinarians, community builders, public relations and communications experts, budget analysts, facility managers, special programs administrators, as well as guardians of various legal, contractual, and policy mandates and initiatives. In addition, principals are expected to serve the often conflicting needs and interests of many stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, district office officials, unions, and state and federal agencies.”

The “job” of school principal, it turns out, has evolved into an overwhelming, hydra-like phenomenon that requires knowledge and skills that many school principals simply do not have. Nevertheless, observes Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), the school principal is “held responsible for just about everything under the sun.” S/he is weighed down by a staggering array of responsibilities without corresponding authority over basic issues such as hiring and firing, school budgets, curriculums, bonuses, and training. Moreover, the process by which individuals aspire to become principals and the preparation they receive to do the job are widely regarded as deeply flawed.

“In the corporate world,” says Tirozzi, “leadership is never an afterthought.” Corporate boards seek the most capable leader they can find. It is rare indeed that a corporate board regards a person who has earned an MBA as an automatic candidate for CEO. Yet as recently as ten years ago, according to Daniel Fallon, chair of the Education Division of Carnegie Corporation, the typical “path” to becoming a school principal has largely consisted of the aspiring principal—self-selected, usually male, and more often a former athlete or coach—taking a set of courses at night to obtain “certification.” For the principal whose management skills and experience were largely limited to managing high school athletic teams, there could be little certainty that he knew and understood what was demanded of him in this extremely complex leadership role. That was then. Now, according to Fallon, principal preparation is “a rapidly moving field. It is vastly different today than it was ten years ago, and it will continue to be different tomorrow.”

Even so, unlike other professions, the current practice still offers no “internship” or in-training apprenticeship for principals. As a result, the newly “certified” principal is in for a rude awakening that first day on the job. Certainly school principals receive greater financial compensation than teachers. However, as Fallon points out, “They work eleven months, not nine, and they have a hell of a lot more headaches.” Much of the 12-to-15 hours a day the new principal spends at work will be consumed dealing with vending machines and broken furnaces, and a wide range of problems including school safety, nutrition, health, housing, employment, drugs, and violence. And, yes, says Gerald Tirozzi, in the remaining time, the principal will keep an eye on the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) linchpin that requires schools to “show significant progress in student achievement as measured by their states’ proficiency tests.” Moreover, according to Tirozzi, there is that proverbial elephant in the room—the glaring, seemingly intractable “issue of equity in this country.” There are “two Americas,” says Tirozzi, and only one of them has a focus on instruction.

Judy B. Codding, vice president of programs for the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and director of NCEE’s America’s Choice Design Network, would probably agree. As a former high school principal at two high-performing, affluent high schools in New York and a low-performing, inner-city high school in Los Angeles, Codding is well-acquainted with the two Americas. The spectacle of one of her students in Los Angeles trying to do his homework under a street lamp because he had no electricity at home is seared into her memory. “In the Scarsdales of America,” she says, “[as principal] you are focused on instruction and learning. In inner cities, instruction is in the background. I had to bring it forward.” The award-winning former principal says that the challenge in Los Angeles was “to get the faculty to believe that students can achieve and to get students to believe that the faculty believes in them.” She adds, “It takes strong leadership—but you [also] have to have a system in place,” a system in which the focus is on developing strategies on behalf of instruction.

Like Tirozzi, Codding views the function of the principal as similar to that of a CEO. The problem, she says, is principals don’t see “the connection between what they [are] expected to do, and how they [are] prepared.” The reason, according to Codding, is that schools of education simply have not done the job of preparing principals to make that connection. Sadly, she says, schools of education tend to function largely as “cash cows” for the university. With millions of dollars a year spent on curriculum, there is “still no coherence in the curriculum for the training of principals.”

Training For A Revolution
By the end of the 1990s, as the number of experienced principals opting for early retirement continued to increase, the number of qualified applicants for positions as principals continued to decline. Attempts to recruit even minimally qualified candidates, especially in school districts in low-income areas, became increasingly difficult. Carnegie Corporation of New York invited NCEE to examine the critical question of school leadership—and to produce a plan for the training of key educational leaders and managers, focusing on school principals. The goal was to design a plan based on the best research and best practices available and, at the same time, take a look at how other institutions such as business and the military addressed the issue of leadership training. Joining Carnegie Corporation in this effort were the Broad Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund.

One result of the two-year NCEE study was the publication in 2005 of The Principal Challenge, Leading and Managing Schools in an Era of Accountability (2005), a virtual primer on the school leadership crisis. Edited by NCEE president Marc S. Tucker and Judy Codding, The Principal Challenge contains nine reports by experts commissioned to examine the “causes and cures” of the school leadership crisis as well as a report by Tucker and Codding that provides an overview of the school leadership crisis entitled “Preparing Principals in the Age of Accountability.”

A second outcome of the study was the establishment of the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL), which, according to Codding, set out to answer the question: “What will it take to train principals to lead a revolution?”

The search for an answer led to an intensive examination of best practices used in business and the military in the training of managers and leaders. As the former provost of the National War College in Washington, D.C., with 26 years of military service behind him, NISL vice president, Dr. Robert C. Hughes, is keenly aware that “In the military, it is assumed you will need to be taught.” Indeed, Hughes observes, in professional military education, the qualifications for each job and career are always clearly defined, and the focus has always been on instruction and practice. It is a step-by-step process through which strengths and skills are built, a system that must remain both “flexible and robust.” It is unfortunate, he says, that in the education of school principals, there has always been a “loose coupling between the principal and instruction.”

In creating learning communities that are focused on practice, NISL is essentially “cohort-based.” In the NISL Executive Development Program, the NISL faculty provides instruction, organized according to a standards-based curriculum, to leadership teams selected from among local educators. These leadership teams—comprised of up to twelve educators, depending on the number of principals to be trained— teach the NISL curriculum to local principals. Leadership teams eventually become NISL-certified instructors. Hughes emphasizes that “The superintendent must be deeply engaged,” otherwise the training effort will not succeed. Instruction is conducted in face-to-face workshops, seminars, and study groups and through the use of state-of-the-art interactive web-based learning. Leading experts are featured in the curriculum. The NISL program is spread out over a year-and-a-half to two years, and includes two summer institutes. NISL projects are now in place in school districts in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

In 2005, NISL incorporated as a profit-making institution. Observes Hughes, “If colleges and universities had a handle on [principal preparation], businesses like NISL wouldn’t exist.” The research is clear, he says, “Without practice and application through initiatives and mentoring and coaching, [principal preparation] is a waste of time.”

Next page: Schools of education function as “cash cows” for the university. With millions of dollars spent on curriculum each year, there is still no coherence in the curriculum for the training of principals.

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