The education community has recently focused a great deal of attention on the need to attract and retain highly qualified educators to serve in school administrative roles. A primary reason is the alarming shortage of qualified administrators available to fill current and foreseeable school principal openings. These shortages largely exist for specific positions, such as the high school principalship or the district superintendency, or in specific geographic locations, such as remote rural areas or challenging urban communities (Forsyth & Smith, 2002; Pounder, Galvin, & Shepherd, 2003). But a general trend is clear: Educators across the board increasingly see the role of the school administrator as being more challenging and less desirable than the job is worth (Lindle, 2004; Pounder & Merrill, 2001).
Systematically addressing a number of key issues can contribute to a stronger pipeline of effective school administrators. Attracting and retaining competent and caring school leaders requires a network of support in which school districts, professional administrator associations, principal academies, and university educational leadership programs collaborate to establish a career-long approach to administrator development.
Tapping the Talent
Tapping leadership talent is a more potent recruitment strategy than the familiar “shotgun” approach. Rather than recruiting leadership talent through broadly targeted mailings, visits, or calls to educators, acting school principals should purposefully identify those teachers or other educators who have clearly demonstrated leadership talent and encourage them to participate in selected leadership activities or administrator orientation programs.
The Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) currently uses this strategy in its leadership preparation and development program. The Board has found that schools and school districts are more likely to grant aspiring leaders access to school data and to activities required by their professional preparation program when the schools have previously identified these staff members—or “tapped” them—as having strong leadership potential. The tapping process can be as informal as encouraging a teacher to enter a school administration certification program. At other times, it can be more structured, involving meetings that acquaint teachers with administrative responsibilities and preparation programs.
We offer one caution about tapping strategies, however. Incumbent administrators may identify as future leaders only those educators whose profiles, values, and behaviors resemble their own. Personnel selection research has demonstrated that we tend to search for candidates who are like ourselves (Pounder & Young, 1996). To encourage the selection of potentially strong leaders whose ethnicity, values, or behaviors may vary from the norm, other education professionals—such as teachers, school counselors, and university professors—should participate in the tapping process.
- Encourage those teachers who demonstrate leadership potential to chair standing committees or special task forces or to coordinate grade-, department-, or school-level initiatives.
- Directly involve aspiring leaders in whole-school planning to give them a broader picture of the many considerations involved in schoolwide efforts.
- Assign aspiring leaders to work closely with diverse student populations, to monitor and analyze these students' learning outcomes, and to report their findings to relevant school and parent groups.
- Provide opportunities for teachers to understand the larger community context by working with school-parent-community groups and related outreach efforts.
- Hone teachers' instructional leadership skills by assigning peer supervision responsibilities.
- Involve teacher leaders in the collection, analysis, and reporting of typical school data that address such accountability issues as school effectiveness or equity of student access and outcomes.
- Include teachers on school leadership teams.
School-based leadership experiences like these help aspiring leaders understand and apply theory and research typically emphasized in formal university preparation programs. Schools that offer such experiences can become true leadership learning laboratories (Crow & Southworth, 2003).
Strengthening Field Experiences
Most formal administrator preparation programs are based in state-approved or nationally accredited university educational leadership departments, although alternative providers are increasingly emerging. Most of these programs lead to a state administrator license. Programs generally include a combination of knowledge development and skill development, but these two aspects of administrator preparation programs are often only loosely connected or coordinated.
This disconnect between theory and practice largely results from having too few “administrative field laboratories” in which students can both apply their leadership and organizational knowledge and build their administrative skills. Teacher preparation institutions often establish relationships with K–12 schools to create professional development schools whose mission is to serve the school's students while preparing a cadre of preservice teachers, developing the school's inservice teachers, and engaging in joint inquiry projects. To practice their craft in local K–12 schools, however, aspiring administrators may require adjustments or accommodations that go far beyond the needs of a given student, teacher, or classroom.
The Complexities of the School-Based Setting
To design field assignments that candidates can complete within complex schoolwide environments and that effectively link to administrative knowledge development, university faculty need the permission and coordination of appropriate K–12 school and district personnel. The participating school must agree to or negotiate the nature of the projects and a host of related practical issues—for example, the length of the project; the permission or cooperation of various entities, such as the school site council, the faculty, the teachers' union, the principal, the district superintendent, the school board, and students' parents; ethical principles that might constrain the project; and ways of managing the assignment or project that will not unduly interfere with other school processes.
In addition, because administrative candidates are typically full-time educators working in a variety of schools while attending a preparation program in the evenings or on weekends, university faculty often work with a different K–12 school for each administrative candidate in the program. Also, administrative candidates often tackle their projects or assignments after school hours because they often teach during the day.
- Establish school-university partnerships between administrative preparation program faculty and K–12 school personnel who are jointly committed both to administrator preparation and to establishing tighter links between knowledge development and skill development in field-based activities.
- Require administrative candidates to conduct group assignments or projects in a common K–12 school so that only one field site is required for several students.
- Establish field assignments that can be repeated—that is, institutionalized—over several semesters or years to avoid recurring start-up costs.
Internships
Although most administrator preparation programs require an internship experience, many of these internships are too short and too lacking in responsibility to adequately prepare candidates for their initial job assignments. To counteract this tendency, some universities—such as the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Utah, and Brigham Young University—have successfully negotiated with local and regional school districts to provide full-year, full-time paid internships as acting assistant principals. We realize that relatively few school districts have the fiscal means to do this, however.
It is the responsibility of the education administration profession at large, rather than of individual school districts or preparation program faculty members, to establish ways to provide realistic, high-quality internship experiences. A good approach is for school districts, administrator preparation programs, administrator professional associations, principal academies, and state offices of education to jointly tackle the problem of inadequate administrative internships within their regions or states. This professional network should also educate policymakers and education foundations about the need for high-quality administrative internship opportunities.
Redefining the Role of the Assistant Principal
Individuals often move into the principalship by one of two routes: either directly from teaching or through the position of assistant principal. Moving from teacher to principal tends to occur primarily in elementary schools or in smaller school districts. In secondary schools or in larger districts, the route more often passes through the assistant principalship.
It used to be that the assistant principalship served as an apprenticeship for the role of principal, providing preparation for the responsibilities, pace, and scope of the position. Over time, however, the role has become more narrowly focused. In many schools, the assistant principal is mainly responsible for student discipline. Although assistant principals may be responsible for some teacher evaluation, they often have minimal instructional leadership responsibility. Moreover, the major adjustment that assistant principals make in some schools is to form alliances with administrators and drop alliances with teachers. Such distancing negatively influences their instructional leadership role (Marshall, 1985).
To transform the assistant principalship into a more comprehensive training ground for aspiring principals, schools should focus on promoting shared leadership and redesigning the role of the assistant principal.
Shared Leadership
When principals create leadership teams, they share leadership responsibilities, model a distributed approach to leadership, and contribute to a professional learning community. Leadership teams often include grade-level leaders, department chairs, team leaders, and others with informal leadership responsibilities. Usually 8–10 people are on a team.
Sharing leadership responsibilities expands the new assistant principal's understanding of the scope of his or her own role beyond student management to include instructional monitoring, supervision, accountability, community relationships, resource allocation, and other administrative responsibilities. Experience on a leadership team also creates a nonheroic image of the role of the principal because a number of people are responsible for school leadership. Finally, a leadership team creates a kind of professional learning community that makes the principal's role public and enables the assistant principal to benefit from behind-the-scenes leadership experiences.
A Role Redesign
Redesigning the position of assistant principal to expand instructional leadership responsibilities can help develop and support a pipeline of quality school leaders. Schools can make the role far more attractive by involving assistant principals in supervising and evaluating teachers and in monitoring and supporting teaching processes and learning outcomes. Assistant principals might be responsible for analyzing student test scores or other student outcomes or for conducting professional development sessions for teachers.
Assistant principals tend to find their role more meaningful when they are responsible for creating learning environments that enhance student achievement and help close the achievement gap. Louisiana is one of the few states that actually give assistant principals the title and corresponding responsibilities of Assistant Principal for Instruction as opposed to the title of Assistant Principal for Discipline, which is common in many secondary schools.
Larger schools can create grade-level principal positions rather than assistant principal positions. Grade-level or subschool principals work under the supervision of the principal but have overall administrative responsibility for one or more specific grade levels within the school. In this model, which is prevalent in Virginia's Fairfax County School District, beginning principals have a more comprehensive array of administrative responsibilities as they work under the supervision and mentorship of an experienced principal.
Most training in university preparation programs focuses on the role of the principal rather than on that of the assistant principal. Consequently, the training that assistant principals receive—in instructional leadership, for example—may not be relevant to the demands of their new positions. Redesigning the role of assistant principal to include instructional leadership responsibilities will increase the potency and relevance of preparation programs.
Districts, professional associations, academies, and universities can cooperate in providing professional development for principals and assistant principals and for larger leadership teams. This professional development can focus on team building, group dynamics, and other skills that facilitate shared instructional leadership responsibility.
De-Stressing the Role of Principal
The increasing intensity and complexity of the principal's role make it harder for schools to attract new administrators and retain midcareer principals. Research suggests that administrator candidates like the more altruistic aspects of the job, such as improving schools and making a difference in students' lives. They are discouraged, however, by the amount of work required and by its toll on their personal lives (Pounder & Merrill, 2001). Principals also report high levels of stress (Lindle, 2004).
Schools need to reconceptualize and redesign the role of principal so that more candidates enter the job and sustain their commitment over time. One strategy is to more fully embrace and implement the concept of distributed leadership in school administrative work. The range of administrative and supervisory responsibilities in complex schools is far too great for one person to effectively manage.
To implement new leadership models, schools and districts must do away with outdated or ineffective roles. For example, district administrators who encourage change but at the same time hold veteran principals solely accountable for school leadership send a conflicting message. School board and community members must come to expect shared leadership and representation by multiple administrative team members rather than by the principal alone. The principal should not be seen as the only appropriate symbol of school leadership at school academic and extracurricular events.
Veteran principals who experience this role change in midcareer often tackle issues of self-esteem (Crow & Matthews, 1998). Moving from heroic leadership to distributed leadership roles may involve a shift in the principal's sense of self-confidence and competence. Midcareer principals may also experience difficulty relinquishing some authority and responsibility. Districts, universities, principal academies, and professional associations can provide resources, such as support groups and peer mentors, to help veteran school leaders deal with new leadership models.
Strengthening the Pipeline
The issues and strategies that we have presented here are not the only considerations in developing a strong pipeline of administrators. They have, however, received far too little attention. To be effective, these strategies require the systemic coordination and resources of the entire professional education community. Developing and sustaining a robust pipeline of competent and caring administrators is everyone's responsibility.
