Ready to Lead? :: Frederick M. Hess

In an era of accountability, when school leaders are expected to demonstrate bottom-line results and use data to drive decisions, the skill and knowledge of principals matters more than ever. Many districts are contemplating reforms that involve decentralization, increased school site autonomy, charter schooling, or more flexible teacher compensation and hiring, and thousands of principals are getting new opportunities to exercise discretion and operate with previously unimagined leeway.

In this environment, school improvement rests to an unprecedented degree on the quality of school leadership. But where can districts turn for the principals they need?

Many observers--including Harvard University's Richard Elmore, Ohio State University's Joe Murphy, the National Center on Education and the Economy's Marc Tucker, the Fordham Foundation's Checker Finn, and New Leaders for New Schools' Jon Schnur--have asked whether traditional approaches to preparing and licensing principals are sufficient for this changing world.

Principals themselves are among the first to suggest they might be more effectively prepared for their jobs. In a 2003 Public Agenda poll, all but 4 percent of practicing principals said on-the-job experiences or guidance from colleagues has been more helpful in preparing them for their current position than their graduate school studies. In fact, 67 percent reported that "typical leadership programs in graduate schools of education are out of touch with the realities of what it takes to run today's school districts."

Providers of principal preparation also have called for new approaches to designing and delivering preparation. Leaders of the University Council for Education Administration have asserted that "we must rethink and revise our practice in several areas." Reforms have included modified education school programs, new state-run principal academies, and changes in state licensure statutes.

Amidst all this activity, however, surprisingly little attention has been paid to what principals are actually learning in the course of their preparation or what this means for school district governance and leadership. A recent four-year study conducted by Art Levine, the president of Teachers College, raised the stakes in this debate by harshly assessing the quality of educational administration programs. Drawing on extensive surveys and case studies of administration leadership programs, Levine concluded that "the majority of [educational administration] programs range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country's leading universities."

Levine reported that the typical course of studies required of principal candidates was largely disconnected from the realities of school management, although he did not analyze the content of the courses themselves. Among his thoughtful solutions: create an education management degree like the MBA, eliminate the Ed.D, and stop districts from offering pay raises for course credit. Such structural changes are certainly welcome, but Levine's study raises a more fundamental question: Is it time to reconceptualize the content of preparation courses as well as their structure?

In two studies completed this spring, we examined what principals are learning in their preparation programs--both the course syllabi and the common textbooks--and what that means for their performance in the schoolhouse. What we found is troubling for school districts seeking principals who are ready and able to seize the rudder and ride out the new challenges of accountability.

A Look at the Courses

In 2004, we surveyed 56 of the 496 programs that grant master's degrees in educational administration and collected at least four "core" course syllabi from 31 of the programs, gathering 210 syllabi in all. The syllabi covered 2,424 weeks of courses. Our sample was composed in equal parts of elite programs that influence professional thinking and practice, large programs that train the most candidates, and more typical programs that are neither prestigious nor especially large.

Our bottom-line finding was that these syllabi paid scant attention to managing with accountability, using data, or making tough personnel decisions. Just 2 percent of the course weeks addressed accountability in the context of school management or school improvement, and just 4.5 percent included instruction on managing school improvement via data, technology, or empirical research. Of 350 course weeks devoted to personnel management, just 3 percent mentioned teacher dismissal and 2 percent mentioned teacher compensation. Just 11 percent of course weeks devoted to personnel management paid any attention at all to the recruitment, selection, and hiring of new teachers.

What about data-driven management? Just 11 percent of 2,424 course weeks mentioned statistics, data, or empirical research. Despite the fact that today's schools are asked to operate in a world of public school choice, increased decentralization, and community engagement, just 1 percent of course weeks addressed school public relations or small business skills and less than 1 percent addressed parental or school board relations. Programs devote only about 12 percent of course instruction to "norms and values," and these few weeks are overwhelmingly negative about reforms like test-based accountability and school choice.

In general, traditional management practice and lessons learned in sectors outside public education attracted little or no attention. Of the 50 living most influential management thinkers--including Peter Drucker and Jim Collins--as determined by a 2003 survey of management professionals and scholars, just nine were assigned in the 210 courses. Their work was assigned a total of 29 times out of 1,851 assigned readings.

Finally, the syllabi suggested skepticism about efficiency, testing, pay-for-performance, or competition. For instance, while influential management thinkers rarely surfaced, staunch critics of market-based reform and test-based accountability like Deborah Meier, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Michael Fullan were among the most frequently assigned authors. Consequently, superintendents and school boards should not be surprised if new principals are predisposed to be skeptical of school choice and or test-based accountability.

A Look at the Texts

In the companion study, we looked to see what the textbooks principal candidates were reading actually addressed. We examined 11 of the 13 most frequently assigned nonlegal texts to see how frequently they addressed such management concepts as "performance," "evaluation," "culture," "accountability," "efficiency," and "termination." The most commonly cited of these terms were "performance" and "achievement," which appeared 44 times per 100 pages.

The next most commonly mentioned terms were "evaluation," at 38 times per 100 pages, and "culture," at 29. Mentioned least frequently among the terms examined were "efficiency," "accountability," and "termination" or "dismissal," all of which were mentioned fewer than six times per 100 pages.

Accountability was mentioned only about five times per 100 pages and, on the whole, the texts were neutral or slightly critical in their treatment of this crucial concept. About 57 percent of mentions were neutral, 23 percent were negative, and 20 percent were either positive or offered instruction on how to manage with accountability.

Teacher termination and dismissal were mentioned only three times per 100 pages of text. The term "efficiency" appeared six times per 100 pages and was mentioned in a positive light about 38 percent of the time and neutrally 49 percent of the time. As with accountability, few mentions offered prescriptions for enhancing or pursuing efficiency.

Lessons for School Districts

In light of our findings, we think there are four lessons for school boards and district officials to keep in mind:

1. Don't assume that new principals are familiar with important skills like using data; managing with accountability; or recruiting, hiring, evaluating, or terminating personnel. These topics don't receive much attention in graduate courses or readings in educational administration. Aspiring principals have had little need or opportunity to cultivate these skills while they were in the classroom. It's also likely that, as assistant principals, they worked under principals who themselves have never had much opportunity to master or embrace these skills. After all, Public Agenda reports that about half of current principals are fundamentally opposed to the idea of evaluating principals on the basis of measured student performance, and only 16 percent of superintendents consider their principals "excellent" when it comes to making thoughtful recommendations on teacher tenure.

2. Don't assume that new principals have a realistic sense of management practices like accountability and decentralization. It's likely that they have had little or no practice with the "balanced scorecard" approach to public sector management, or with bottom-lining program cost, devising new performance metrics, or reengineering school operations. Don't even assume they know where to look for guidance or suggestions. Having not studied concepts from outside the world of educational administration, they may not know where to start in seeking ideas or references.

3. Don't assume that principals have been exposed to management practices in settings outside the schoolhouse. In many other fields, people circulate through a variety of organizations on their way to managerial roles. Future principals, of course, start as classroom teachers, complete their administrative credential, and then serve as assistant principals. While this usually ensures that they have exposure to multiple schools (and often to multiple school districts), it also means they have little or no exposure to organizations other than public schools. Such exposure can introduce them to new ideas, show them how managers in other settings address common challenges, and foster nontraditional thinking.

4. Don't be surprised if new principals are unenthusiastic about reforms like accountability and school choice or are unprepared to market their schools, compete for students, or engage in entrepreneurial leadership. For some board and district officials, this state of affairs may not cause much concern. For boards eager to embrace school choice or charter schooling, however, the lack of attention that preparation devotes to business skills may be a real impediment. Similarly, the negative approach of preparation programs to reforms like school choice and test-based accountability suggests that new principals may be unreliable field captains for such initiatives.

What Should Districts Do?

What does all of this mean for school boards and district leaders? We think it recommends at least five courses of action:

1. Be reasonable in your expectations. Given what principals don't learn during their preparation, it is not reasonable to expect them to know how to use accountability data to focus on results and diagnose weaknesses, how to avoid the temptation to micromanage, how to identify inefficiencies, or how to operate in a choice-based environment. It is not enough to tell principals, "This is what we expect." Instead, give principals workable examples of what sound data analysis looks like, what a good marketing plan is, how they can monitor teachers without falling back on intimidation or red tape, and so on. Part of this process is exposing principals to ideas from outside the schoolhouse and to different kinds of organizational environments.

2. Provide mentoring and development that address ground left uncovered during formal preparation. Provide workshops that expose principals to management skills and concepts that--while commonplace outside education--they may not have encountered on their job or in their training. This might entail professional development that includes reading groups or sessions with professors whose expertise is in public or private sector management, rather than in educational administration. It might entail regular seminars focused on nontraditional readings for which principals receive professional development credit or release time.
For example, principals benefit immensely from exposure to books like management expert Jim Collins' Good to Great or Built to Last, Harvard Business School professor Clay Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma, business writer Michael Lewis' Moneyball or The New New Thing, or any number of other provocative and accessible studies of management. The point is not to promote new silver bullets, management orthodoxies, or buzzwords, but to expose principals to perspectives that may spark new ways of thinking about their work.

It's also worth pursuing collaborations that offer principals a chance to observe and interact with managerial peers in other organizations. This might mean freeing up administrative time after the end of the school year, but still on the 11-month calendar, and arranging a two- or three-week program with local firms or public sector agencies. Districts without appropriate local partners might want to explore more formal arrangements or programs coordinated through business schools or schools of public management.

One model comes from Britain's National College for School Leadership, which has partnered with a national group called Business in the Community to create the Partners in Leadership Program. The program pairs "headteachers," the British equivalent of principals, with senior business leaders across the country and facilitates interaction between the partners by arranging six sit-down meetings each year and planning regional conferences featuring industry experts and veteran headteachers. Since 1999, 4,600 headteachers have formed partnerships with business leaders from more than 1,200 different organizations.

3. Emphasize goals for accountability, evaluation, and decentralization that are straightforward and more readily managed. Similarly, make expectations clear and routinely assess leadership performance. As with anything else, there are managerial schemes of varying complexity and sophistication--and the experts will happily explain why the more nuanced models are typically the best bet. That may be true, in theory. However, so long as districts are working to tackle merit pay, site-based budgeting, or data analysis with unprepared principals, elegant design should probably take a backseat to workability and simplicity.

4. Create opportunities to exploit the skills of veteran principals. Our most effective principals today routinely rely on experience, street smarts, district contacts, and personal charisma to compensate for incomplete preparation and a limited toolbox of management skills. Almost half of the principals in a Public Agenda poll said they "feel like [their] hands are tied by the way things are done in the school system" and that they "must work around the system" to get things done. Too often, entrepreneurial principals who seek to start new programs or gain flexibility are marginalized by central office administrators who regard them as malcontents, troublemakers, and iconoclasts. Instead, district leaders need to respect these veterans and find ways to make them more available as mentors and instructors.

5. Consider nontraditional candidates. Programs like New Leaders for New Schools (www.nlns.org) or other efforts to bring nontraditional principals into school systems often attract candidates whose experiences and strengths are in short supply. While district officials will be understandably cautious about the promise of such candidates, recognize that they may have expertise leading with data or accountability, leveraging technology, or managing personnel that traditional candidates did not learn in their educational administration programs or in the classroom. An infusion of such principals who can pioneer new routines and mentor their peers can provide workable examples of entrepreneurial leadership and help transform school management.

Bad management fosters faculty resentment and backlash by encouraging small-minded leadership, unnecessary rule making, and defensive practices that squeeze creativity and initiative. These are characteristics of early industrial oversight and old-fashioned "scientific management," rather than the more flexible model of sensible public accountability that we've worked to develop in recent decades and that motivated the Clinton administration's "reinventing government" push in the 1990s.

The cost of incompetent management is high, in both the short and the long term. In addition to causing immediate headaches, it can also undermine support for the kinds of reform that can transform schools into environments where administrators and teachers are valued, rewarded for their efforts, and given the latitude to use their skills to the full extent of their ability.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and the director of education policy studies at AEI. Andrew P. Kelly is a graduate student in political science at the University of California-Berkeley. This article is based on their recent studies, "Learning to Lead?" and "Textbook Leadership?"

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