Looking for the Principal

During her first public testimony before the House Committee on
Education and the Workforce last month, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos
told Congress that “there’s no one more important to a student’s education than
a great teacher.” She also said, “I think they should be better compensated. I
think they should be treated as professionals. The system as it is today
doesn’t treat them as professionals.”

This occurred in the midst of a wave of teacher walkouts that have
recently hit Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West
Virginia—states with some of the lowest teacher salaries in the
country.
Teachers aren’t only staging walkouts for higher pay, but also for more
education funding to improve working conditions, so that they don’t have to
teach students in dilapidated classrooms with old
textbooks while
trying to hold a second job. In response, Congressional Democrats
have put forward an education proposal that would provide $50 billion in
federal funds to increase teacher compensation, as well as another $50 billion
to upgrade school infrastructure and resources.

But having a positive work environment and being treated as a
professional aren’t just about higher pay and adequate supplies. A recent
survey by the National Center for Education Statistics finds
that teachers who are satisfied with how things are run at their school are
also more likely to be satisfied with their salaries. And the person “running things”? The school
principal—a  player who’s largely been
missing from the broader conversation on improving teacher workplace
satisfaction, despite the fact that the principal, in many ways, holds the keys
to teacher success.

School leaders are crucial to the progress of a school: Research commissioned by the Wallace Foundation
in 2010 didn’t find “a single case of a school improving its student
achievement record in the absence of talented leadership.” Likewise, other research has found that the quality of school leadership is one of the most important factors in
whether a teacher decides to stay or leave a school. And yet, for years
policymakers have primarily focused their time and resources on how to improve
and assess teacher quality, with less focus on the leaders who create the
conditions necessary for teachers to thrive.

Principals have a big job, with several implications for teachers.
Most people think of principals’ roles as setting the school’s vision,
interpreting and implementing education policy, and managing schedules,
budgets, community and family relationships, student safety, and a slew of
other organizational tasks. But while that’s true, increasingly, principals are
also expected to excel as “instructional leaders” by doing things like
providing feedback and coaching to teachers on their practice, and connecting
instructional approaches and curricular resources to state standards. On top of
that, they are expected to use student learning data to inform professional
learning for teachers.

So what, exactly, does it take for a principal to be effective—not
only as an organizational leader, but also as an instructional leader?

Recent reports by New America provide recommendations for how states
and districts can help principals develop skills and focus their time on
instructional leadership. One avenue is through existing principal evaluation
and support systems. New America’s research on state evaluation policies found
that most states include a focus on instructional leadership skills and
behaviors in these systems, but that there’s still wide variation in how states and districts define
instructional leadership and support implementation.

Take New Mexico,
which has developed a School Leader Evaluation Guidance Workbook for principal
supervisors that includes an overview of their principal evaluation components,
including an assessment of feedback to teachers. Other states are setting up
mentoring programs and leadership academies. Idaho, for instance, is supporting
early-career principals through a mentoring project through which retired
superintendents and principals work with current principals throughout the year
on four specific areas: interpersonal and facilitation skills, teacher
observation and feedback, effective school-level and classroom-level practices,
and use of data to improve instruction.

Meanwhile, three states—Minnesota, Missouri, and Texas—are providing more in-depth and
comprehensive support by adding capacity via additional staff or partnerships
that can provide ongoing and individualized support to leaders at the school
and district level. Minnesota has hired four principal specialists, based out
of the state’s regional education centers, to support principal evaluation
implementation and growth. The specialists are responsible for things like
supporting principal supervisors and principals to build capacity in
instructional coaching, hosting professional development sessions, and creating
networks and communities of practice. Missouri created the Missouri Leadership
Development System, which it describes as a comprehensive and progressive
sequence of professional learning for principals that’s broken up into four
career stages, and includes specific support for principals during each of
those stages. And in Texas, the state has partnered with three nonprofit
third-party providers to give instructional leadership training to vertically
aligned school teams made up of principal supervisors, principals, and campus
leaders. The aim is to build instructional leadership capacity across the
state.

With the right design and aligned supports, these principal evaluation
systems can provide greater focus and clarity on principal’s responsibilities
as instructional leader, and guide principal supervisors on how best to support
principal growth in this area.

Another avenue is through having other staff—teacher leaders and/or
school administration teams—within the building take on some of the typical
responsibilities of the principal, so that the principal can have a more
focused role. Some school districts—including Council Bluffs Community School
District in Iowa; Fitchburg, Massachusetts; and District of Columbia Public
Schools—are trying out promising new school leadership models in this vein, with the goal of
bolstering principals’ ability to focus on improving the quality of
instructional support given to teachers.

While these two approaches—principal evaluation and support systems on
the one hand, and new school leadership models on the other—may not be panaceas
for the issues beleaguering schools today, they
pull into focus a key component of what makes our teachers satisfied and our
schools successful: the school leader.