We know that principal leadership is crucial to success of schools and students, particularly urban ones, but the Wallace Foundation’s new report, Districts Matter, adds that school districts can cultivate that strong leadership and “ensure they have principals capable of boosting teaching and learning.” The new report “draws on a decade of foundation research and work in school leadership to describe nine steps districts can take” to improve their schools by finding and retaining the best principals. “Actions include everything from establishing selective hiring procedures to providing mentoring to novice leaders.”
From the executive summary of the report:
The school district profoundly shapes the destinies of its principals: how they are trained, hired, mentored, evaluated and developed on the job. Yet until recently, many educators and policymakers overlooked the unique role districts can play to help principals shoulder their central responsibility: improving teaching and learning.
Armed with new evidence about the importance of school leadership and how it can best be developed, a growing number of large districts are seeking to cultivate first-rate principals for all their schools.
Doing so requires that they carry out two big tasks.
First, build a large corps of well-qualified candidates for the principalship:
- Create job descriptions that clearly spell out what principals need to know and do to drive better instruction.
- Improve “pre-service” principal training.
- Establish selective hiring procedures that identify the most promising future leaders and match them to the right schools.
- Ensure that hard-to-staff schools get top-quality leaders.
Second, support school leaders on the job:
- Develop fair, reliable performance evaluations that hold principals accountable for student progress and inform their ongoing training.
- Offer mentoring to novice principals and professional development to all principals, so school leaders improve throughout their careers.
- Provide school leaders with timely, useful data and training on how to use it.
- Enable principals to devote sufficient time to improving instruction and to making the best use of that time.
- Plan for orderly turnover and leadership succession.
Of course, ensuring that principals receive this level of support from their districts is also a difficult task, which depends largely on having good leadership at the district level. But the Wallace Foundation’s convincing argument about the key role of principals may convince school districts of the necessity of making changes to support their principals in their ongoing quest to help their students. Ultimately, a school district with a cadre of strong principals will have a core of leadership that will be in position to ensure that reforms reach every classroom.
For more information, please visit the following website:
http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/district-policy-and-practice/Pages/Districts-Matter-Cultivating-the-Principals-Urban-Schools-Need.aspx
