This guide will help education leaders align evaluation and its uses with an Opportunity Culture and similar school models and career paths.
How to Radically Improve Teacher & Principal Preparation
How can new teachers and principals start their jobs prepared for educational excellence, and how can the schools that hire them know they’re ready to excel? In today’s preparation systems, no one is fully getting what they need—not aspiring teachers and principals, not schools, not students. There is a better way. In Opportunity Culture schools, […]
How to Lead a Schoolwide “Team of Leaders”: Tools for Principals
In the most successful Opportunity Culture schools, principals lead a team of multi-classroom leaders—strong teachers who lead small teams and are accountable for outcomes in each grade and/or subject—to ensure instructional excellence schoolwide. Successful principals say this schoolwide “team of leaders” approach is crucial to their students’ success and to providing teachers with deep support […]
Every School Can Have a Great Principal: A Fresh Vision for How
This column first appeared on Education Next.
Great teachers matter—we all know that. But great principals matter nearly as much. We recently profiled three principals who achieved strong student learning growth in their schools in tough circumstances. Forming and leading a team of teacher-leaders proved crucial to all. But then what?
Can great principals take their leadership to the next level and stay connected to teachers and students? Could they reach all schools, not just the fraction they reach today?
We asked just that, and here’s our answer: yes.
In An Excellent Principal for Every School: Transforming Schools into Leadership Machines, we share our vision for how districts and charter networks can reach a lot more students and teachers—potentially all—with great principals, for much higher pay, within regular budgets.
You might recognize this concept, since we’ve floated—and implemented—similar ideas with teachers in Opportunity Culture schools in several states already (including unionized districts). We’ve now extended our thinking to principals.
We envision four essential ingredients to provide far more schools with excellent principals:
- Commitment. Districts commit to reaching all students with great teaching and all teachers with great leadership. Pursuit of these goals drives school staffing and design decisions.
- Multi-Classroom Leaders. Great teachers lead small teams covering one or more grades or subjects, co-planning, co-teaching, and coaching teachers, and they are accountable for student outcomes of the whole team and for teacher development. They earn far more, too.
- Schoolwide Team of Leaders. Principals lead their multi-classroom leaders as a team of leaders to improve instruction and implement a culture of excellence schoolwide.
- Multi-School Leadership. Great principals extend their reach to small numbers of schools as “multi-school leaders” while developing principals, and principals-in-training, on the job. They also earn more.
If every great principal eventually led four schools, on average, as a multi-school leader, then every school could have an excellent, proven principal in charge of student learning, teacher leadership, and the development of other principals on the job.
A nod to recent teacher-leadership efforts: This leadership machine is powered by teacher-leaders. Not just any teacher-leaders, but ones with a lot more authority and a lot more accountability, and pay, than usual.
How? Opportunity Culture models extend the reach of excellent teachers and their teams to more students, for more pay, within budget. A team of teachers and administrators decides how to redo schedules and reallocate money to fund pay supplements permanently, in contrast to temporarily grant-funded programs. Schools provide additional school-day time for planning and collaboration, typically with teacher-leaders, whom we call multi-classroom leaders, leading teams and providing frequent, on-the-job development. Multi-classroom leaders provide frequent, in-depth support to the teachers on their teams—far more than a principal can for 20 to 50 individual teachers. Early outcomes indicate far more high growth and less low growth among students than comparable schools and strong teacher satisfaction.
To complete the leadership machine, principals must lead multi-classroom leaders as a team to drive instructional excellence schoolwide. As teacher-leaders take over responsibility for instructional excellence with the principal, a noninstructional operations manager role can take the place of an assistant principal position in most schools. In addition to focusing noninstructional duties away from principals, the operations manager role does not require the same level of education and certification.
This saves money to pay multi-school leaders substantial supplements. Paid principal-in-training residencies in some schools can also save money and become possible by having neophytes step up from multi-classroom leadership—where they’ve already learned to lead adults—and work under a multi-school leader.
These staffing changes allow multi-school leader (MSL) pay of at least 10 percent more than principals, potentially 20 percent more on average—and far more if experienced, successful MSLs take on a couple more schools than our proposed average of four.
With the right underlying supports, Multi-School Leadership creates a sustainable leadership machine: a larger pipeline of great leaders for schools and teaching teams, developed on the job from the start of their teaching careers, and earning far more than usual, within recurring budgets.
It could also bring more potential leaders into teaching and improve the implementation of curriculum and instructional changes. Imagine [insert your favorite curriculum element or teaching method] with excellent teachers in charge of implementation, supported by excellent principals.
What’s scarcest of the essential ingredients? Commitment. The rest is doable, as early Opportunity Culture schools have demonstrated.
Ultimately, research indicates that better leadership pays off in higher levels of student growth and achievement. For principals, teachers, and students, it’s time to let great principals extend their reach and lead schools that are leadership—and learning—machines.
An Excellent Principal for Every School: Transforming Schools Into Leadership Machines
Idea paper lays out a vision for how districts can reach dramatically more students with great principals, for much higher pay, within budget.
School Turnarounds: How Successful Principals Use Teacher Leadership
As the Opportunity Culture initiative was beginning, three principals signed on to lead low-performing, high-poverty schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Metropolitan Nashville districts. The odds were stacked against them and their students—one school, for example, has student transiency rates of 70 percent and higher. But within a few short years, their schools all showed very […]
Recruit, Select, and Support: Turnaround Leader Competencies
Learning module provides state and district leaders with tools to identify and apply turnaround leader competencies to the selection and development of school turnaround leaders.
Turnaround Leader Actions and Competencies
Turnaround principal actions and competencies are the leading indicators for turnaround principal success.
Opportunity Culture Principals Speak: “People Want to Be a Part of This”
Now, it’s the principals’ turn: We’ve shared videos of multi-classroom leaders and team teachers telling why they love their jobs in the Metro Nashville schools that have created an Opportunity Culture. Hear why the principals at Bailey STEM Magnet Middle School and Buena Vista Elementary call an Opportunity Culture “sustainable,” “innovative,” and the “it factor” in changing the game for students and teachers. These principals’ schools use multi-classroom leadership, setting up the feedback loops from team teaching, collaboration, and teacher-leadership that they and their teachers revel in.
“Absolutely the most powerful benefit is student achievement”
“You make sure that every single child is in a top-quality classroom”
“Teachers are applying at newfound rates to be a part of this work”
And watch this blog! We’ll have more videos to come in 2015 from other Opportunity Culture sites, such as Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cabarrus County, N.C., and Syracuse, N.Y.
Leadership Keys: How to Get Great Principals, Use Teacher-Leaders
Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, which Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, put a needed focus on the importance of finding the best principal for each school. By getting an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country, Doyle and Locke highlighted how far short those processes fall, even in districts they deem “ahead of the curve.”
In response, the authors offer six recommendations for district leaders seeking to improve their recruitment, selection, and placement of school principals:
- Make the job more appealing—and manageable. Give principals the power to lead, including authority over key staffing decisions, operations, and resources. And give them a cadre of teacher-leaders to share the load today—and fill the pipeline for tomorrow (more on that below).
- Pay great leaders what they’re worth. Compensation must be commensurate with the demands, responsibilities, and risks of the job. Principals should earn considerably more than other school staff with less responsibility and should be duly compensated for producing success.
- Take an active approach to recruitment. Develop criteria to identify promising candidates inside and outside of the district. Actively seek out those individuals. Woo them when necessary. Identify and prepare internal candidates systematically—and early—and eliminate barriers that discourage high-potential candidates.
- Evaluate candidates against the competencies and skills that research shows successful principals demonstrate. Then create rubrics for judging candidates against those competencies. Train raters to use the rubrics effectively.
- Design the placement process to match particular schools’ needs with particular candidates’ strengths. Assess schools’ priorities and leadership needs, and develop criteria to assess a candidate’s fit.
- Continually evaluate hiring efforts. Develop metrics to assess each stage of the process, particularly in relation to the school results that follow.
(See Education Week‘s look at the report here.)
Public Impact has long focused on the importance of school leadership, especially when districts attempt to turn around failing schools—check our list of resources below.
And we see real promise for bettering the conditions for principals—making the role more appealing and strengthening the much-discussed, truly important pipeline of future leaders—through our Opportunity Culture work. Opportunity Culture schools extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. One way to do this is by creating the multi-classroom leader (MCL) role—in which an excellent teacher continues to teach while leading a team of teachers, with plenty of school-day time for planning, collaboration, and providing daily on-the-job professional learning to the team.
MCLs can help principals tremendously. These teacher-leaders mean principals no longer bear sole responsibility for the leadership and evaluation of all teachers in the building. And while most MCLs take the job because they want to continue teaching, some will find the principal role appealing, creating a pipeline of future principals experienced as instructional leaders.
We all know how much school leaders matter. Let’s put some remedies into action—starting with these.
See more about Multi-Classroom Leaders:
Hiring Top Principals: Lessons from 5 Urban Districts
In Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke took an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country–and came up with six steps districts can take to hire the best principals for each school.
Written for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Lacking Leaders discusses the need to make the job more appealing, manageable, and appropriately compensated; the need to actively recruit and evaluate high-quality candidates and match schools with candidates’ strengths; and the need for ongoing evaluation of hiring efforts.
Some excerpts from some of the news coverage about the report:
- Practices for hiring school principals fall short, study says (WCPO, Cincinnati):
We knew little about how great leaders were recruited, developed and placed, and wanted to unveil a little bit of that mystery,” [Gillian] Locke said.
The impact of hiring a principal that is a good fit for a school district can be profound, according to Locke.
“Research shows that leaders matter a lot,” Locke said. “There is a direct correlation that about one-fourth of a school’s impact on achievement can be attributed to that school’s leader.”
Locke said the study’s primary finding is that principal hiring practices, even in pioneer districts, are falling behind, and needy schools aren’t getting the leaders they need.
However, hiring practices are not the entire solution.
“Being a principal is a tough responsibility,” Locke said. “Districts need to re-imagine the principal’s role in order to attract people to the job and pay leaders what they’re worth. The study’s evidence shows that this is a hard job to staff.”
- Should principals be treated like CEOs? (The Atlantic):
[I]n many districts aspiring teachers take a pay cut on their way to the principal’s office. “It’s not uncommon for principals to have to become an assistant principal first,” says Daniela Doyle, a senior consultant with Public Impact and co-author of the Fordham study. “Often it’s not that the base pay is lower, it’s that teachers are eligible for supplemental pay through special duties they can assume or national board certifications.” Above all else, Doyle found the five school districts struggled with principal placement because they don’t really recruit. “There are great principal candidates falling through the cracks,” she says. “Schools did very little to actively find people. They often just advertised a position, sitting back and waiting for the talent to come to them, which we know from other sectors isn’t usually an effective strategy.”
Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement
Report takes an in-depth look at principal hiring practices in five urban districts.