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.