“Operating in the Dark”: Principal Preparation Reform

Posted on February 24, 2013 by coreeducation

Yet another report on school reform has urged reform in the area of school leadership. This report, entitled, “Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership” and produced by the George W. Bush Institute and the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership.

What stands out about “Operating in the Dark” are the following factors:

Its particular focus on principalship
Its basis in self-reported data
Its state by state breakdown of data and recommendations

“Operating in the Dark” is a first-of-its-kind report on states’ policies that affect principal preparation, licensure, tenure, and data collection. This report explores how states are using their authority to increase the supply of effective principals focused on raising student achievement. The findings are based on self-reported data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. “Operating in the Dark” includes state policy recommendations to drive needed reforms and gives the educational community new insights on promising efforts by states to improve the supply of high-quality principals.

Specific recommendations of the report include:

Principal Preparation Program Approval

• States need to understand the growing body of research highlighting the wide range of skills and behaviors that principals need to succeed in the highly complex and demanding job of school leader. This research should be incorporated into state requirements for principal preparation programs to ensure that programs produce high-quality candidates. Effective preparation programs include a number of key elements, including: being expressly designed to produce and place principals who improve student learning; having clearly defined principal competencies; strategically recruiting high-potential candidates into the program; using a rigorous candidate selection process; providing relevant coursework taught by faculty with practitioner experience; incorporating authentic learning experiences in real school settings; and ensuring that graduates demonstrate mastery of competencies.

• States should allow organizations other than higher education institutions to be approved to provide principal preparation, as long as those programs meet the same rigorous standards.

• States should monitor principal preparation program outcome data and hold programs accountable for producing effective principals.

Principal Licensure

• States should move away from input-based principal licensing requirements such as years of teaching and degrees, which are not accurate proxies or predictors of principal effectiveness. For licensure to signal proof of competence, states should seek out a new form of performance-based assessment that measures the more complex skills research shows effective school leaders need to succeed.

• States should base principal license renewal decisions on job performance and demonstration of competencies that correlate with principal effectiveness measures, including impact on student achievement. Leaders repeatedly receiving poor ratings should not have their licenses renewed.

In conclusion, the report finds that “states need to be able to measure principals’ ability to secure jobs, retain jobs, demonstrate an impact on student achievement, and receive effective evaluation ratings. With this information, states can make strategic decisions and investments that result in a more highly qualified principal pool.”

Clearly, principals have great power to improve schools, attract and retain effective teachers, and increase student learning. It is time for state-led efforts to reform principal preparation and licensure.

The executive summary and full report can be found at www.bushcenter.org/education-policy.

Preparing School Leaders for Next Generation Learning

Posted on February 13, 2013 by coreeducation

A new partnership between the non-profit group New Leaders and Pearson Education seeks to improve the performance of school leadership through the use of technology-backed professional learning opportunities.

New Leaders, the non-profit organization whose mission is to develop school leaders and promote system-wide conditions for student success, is partnering with the education services and technology company Pearson to accelerate access to best-in-class, research-based training opportunities for the nation’s principals and school leaders.

New Leaders CEO Jean Desravines said, “Research shows that effective school leaders have a tremendous impact on student achievement by attracting, retaining, and developing our greatest teachers and ensuring strong instruction and learning for all of their students. Unfortunately, world-class products and services are not readily available to help school systems identify and develop excellent school leaders.”

Desravines added, “In today’s technology-driven world, we all need on-going professional development to stay competitive – and that’s especially true for our school leaders who are charged with ensuring our students are competitive with their global peers. By combining the capabilities of New Leaders with Pearson, we can rapidly scale the critical work of transforming school performance by helping states and districts identify and develop highly effective leaders.”

New Leaders and Pearson are coming together to meet this need by creating tools and professional learning opportunities designed to support school and district leadership development efforts and build leaders’ strengths in instructional leadership, managing teacher effectiveness, and continuous improvement practices. The tools and learning opportunities will include a framework for principal excellence, evaluation rubrics to assess principals’ performance, training for principal evaluators, and web-based professional development modules.

Will Ethridge, Pearson’s CEO of North American Education, said, “This partnership is a unique opportunity for us to combine programs and technologies from Pearson’s School Achievement Services, which is dedicated to providing high quality professional learning to educators, with the ground-breaking work that New Leaders has been doing for the past 12 years. One of the key components to our partnership with New Leaders is their substantial research in high-poverty schools and work with successful principals that has led to new models to transform those schools that are serving our poorest and most underserved children. Our Pearson teams will scale and share these solutions across the U.S.”

Alison Wagner, Pearson’s School Achievement Services President, noted, “To succeed in meeting the expectations of the Common Core, we will need leaders who are prepared to provide their faculties with the regular planning, coaching, and evidence-based feedback teachers need as they make these instructional changes. The solutions we will create with New Leaders will help states and districts develop school leaders who are ready to play this crucial role.”

For more information, please visit: http://www.newleaders.org/pearson-partnership-announcement/

The Effect of Effective Principals

Posted on January 30, 2013 by coreeducation

The Wallace Foundation finds after ten years of research that the leadership principals provide to schools is the second most important factor directly impacting student performance, after only teacher performance.

According to a new report prepared by the Wallace Foundation, “a national philanthropy that seeks to improve education and enrichment for disadvantaged children”, the reason that principals play such a large role is the fact that they are at the nexus of many different factors and have the ability to put a positive stamp on each.

Over the past ten years, the Wallace Foundation has funded projects in 28 states and many other specific districts and issued over 70 research reports concerning school leadership. They have boiled down their findings into five key practices of effective principals:

Shaping a vision of academic success for all students.
Creating a climate hospitable to education.
Cultivating leadership in others.
Improving instruction.
Managing people, data and processes to foster school improvement.

The full report, which can be found here (and at the link below), provides elaboration on each. Another particularly salient finding, separately confirmed by researchers at the universities of Minnesota and Toronto, concerns the direct connection between principal performance and student achievement:

“Drawing on both detailed case studies and large-scale quantitative analysis, the research shows that most school variables, considered separately, have at most small effects on learning. The real payoff comes when individual variables combine to reach critical mass. Creating the conditions under which that can occur is the job of the principal. Indeed, leadership is second only to classroom instruction among school-related factors that affect student learning in school.”

Findings about the effects of principals will be followed up with a Wallace Perspective series focusing on “school leadership and how it is best developed and supported.” Subsequent publications will delve into “the role of school districts, states and principal training programs in building good school leadership.”

For more information, please visit:

http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/effective-principal-leadership/Pages/The-School-Principal-as-Leader-Guiding-Schools-to-Better-Teaching-and-Learning.aspx

http://www.wallacefoundation.org/Pages/default.aspx

9 Model Ohio schools: Principals and Teachers are crucial to success

Posted on January 1, 2013 by coreeducation

Too often do we in the field of education policy end up discussing only the negatives: red tape, too little funding, changed programs, poor communication, lack of support, etc. In recent years, principals and teachers have often borne the brunt of the criticism, although research into successful schools consistently shows that good principals and teachers are doing the work each day that is necessary to create successful schools and students. A recent report, “Failure is not an Option,” from Public Agenda suggests some salient characteristics of successful schools, regardless of grade level or location.

Each of the nine schools was in the high-poverty and high-achieving bracket and faced such additional difficulties as tight budgets, sub-optimal parent participation, and ill preparation. So, in order to discern more about the reasons for success at these schools, Public Agenda asked the following questions of principals, teachers, students, and parents:

How do they define the keys to success?
What are some specific strategies and decisions that may contribute to their success?
How do they sustain success?
What helps them weather tough times?

Public Agenda found the following positive commonalities among the schools:

Principals lead with a strong and clear vision for their school, engage staff in problem solving and decision making, and never lose sight of their school’s goals and outcomes.
Teachers and administrators are dedicated to their school’s success and committed to making a difference in their students’ lives.
School leaders provide genuine opportunities and incentives for teachers to collaborate and share best practices.
Teachers regard student data as clarifying and helpful. They use it to inform instruction.
Principals and teachers have high expectations for all students and reject any excuses for academic failure.
School leaders and teachers set high expectations for school discipline and student behavior.
Schools offer students nontraditional incentives for academic success and good behavior.
Students feel valued, loved and challenged. They are confident that their teachers will help them succeed and be at their side if they hit a rough patch.
Principals and teachers do not see the lack of parent and community support as an insurmountable barrier to student achievement and learning.
School leaders and teachers seek continuous improvement for both their practices and student achievement. Today’s success is tomorrow’s starting point.
Each school has its own story of change and improvement, yet some commonalities exist.

Finally, Public Agenda sought to find what could be done to sustain success:

Plan for smooth principal transitions. Change is inevitable.
Engage teachers.
When hiring, make sure incoming teachers endorse the school’s vision and practices.
Leverage a great reputation.
Celebrate success.

The fact that one of the recommendations specifically mentions hiring is crucial; if it is so clear that good principals and teachers lead to successful schools, then that means that hiring good people takes a front seat in considerations of how to improve schools.

For an overview of the report and a link to the full report, please visit: http://www.publicagenda.org/pages/failure-is-not-an-option

Rethinking Principal Evaluation

Posted on October 11, 2012 by coreeducation

A new report from the National Association of Elementary School Principals (NAESP) looks at the emerging policy focus of principal accountability. In 2011, NAESP and the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) created a joint Principal Evaluation Committee to develop a framework for principal evaluation for use as a guide to improving professional practice. The new report, Rethinking Principal Evaluation, provides a framework with six key domains of leadership responsibility that fall within a principal’s sphere of influence.

These domains include:

Professional growth and learning;
Student growth and achievement;
School planning and progress;
School culture;
Professional qualities and instructional leadership; and
Stakeholder support and engagement.

In the report, the Principal Evaluation Committee also offers a framework for evaluation that includes the voice of principals and their view of an effective principal evaluation system. The framework includes four focus areas that offer a roadmap for federal, state, and local policymakers as they rethink approaches to principal evaluation:

Consider context
Incorporate standards that can improve practice
Use evaluation to build capacity
Focus on multiple measures of performance data.

The report also highlights the “essential features” identified by principals and backed by research that must be included when designing a comprehensive evaluation system. First, the system must be created by and for principals. Second, it must include systemic support, including professional development, induction support, and recognition of advanced performance. The system must also have flexibility, relevance, accuracy, stability, and reliability, as well as fairness and utility.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.naesp.org/rethinking-principal-evaluation

CRPE Introduces Tools and Strategies to Help States Develop Great Principals

Posted on September 18, 2012 by coreeducation

Discussions about human capital and school improvement typically center on teachers. Yet the principals who select those teachers are a critical driver of school success. Just as states are beginning to address the weaknesses in their principal pipelines, a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) offers a set of powerful new tools to help state policymakers diagnose their principal workforce needs and develop comprehensive strategies to address them.

Principal Concerns: Leadership Data and Strategies for States, written by Christine Campbell and Betheny Gross, includes a data guide for anticipating leadership needs and a framework for designing policies to get the right leaders into the right jobs.

The report’s “State Principal Data Guide” identifies metrics policymakers should track and analyze in order to develop effective, state-specific policies. For example:
–Merge principal and school performance data to learn which principal preparation programs graduate the most effective school leaders.
–Anticipate upcoming retirements and professional development needs by tracking principal age and performance trends, by school type and location.

Within the report, the “Principal Pipeline Framework,” helps states prioritize smart policies to attract and make the most of strong principal talent. The framework includes policies regarding:
– How to design the principalship as an attractive job that challenges and rewards capable people.
– How to draw the most talented prospects to the field.
– How to provide incentives that draw the best, most determined leaders into the most challenged schools.

The authors suggest a number of specific actions states can take, such as providing more autonomy to principals, limiting barriers to credentialing, and making mentors out of high-performing principals.

With retirements on the horizon and strong leaders in short supply, states need to act now to shape broad, comprehensive solutions that improve the job, attract the most promising candidates, and get them into the schools that need them most. CRPE’s new tools can help states move closer to the ultimate goal: an engaged leader in every school who knows how to develop and retain talented teachers and, ultimately, improve student outcomes.

To read the report and access the various tools, visit http://www.crpe.org/publications/principal-concerns-leadership-data-and-strategies-states

The Making of the Principal

Posted on July 1, 2012 by coreeducation

In the latest edition of the Wallace Foundation’s Perspective, the focus is again on school leadership. In “The Making of the Principal: Five Lessons in Leadership Training,” the authors seek to discover what it will take to ensure that all public schools have leaders equal to the challenges facing the public school system.

The report finds that more districts, particularly large urban districts most in need of good leaders, have been investing in principal preparation programs and more rigorous mentoring and other supports to new principals. States have also been tightening accreditation rules and adopting new standards to push universities and other principal training providers to improve their programs.

However, though some steps have been taken to better prepare principals, the authors note that there is still “a long way to go” before principal preparation programs are adequate to meet the challenges facing principals. From the research culled by the authors, they suggest districts heed the following five lessons:

A more selective, probing process for choosing candidates for training is the essential first step in creating a more capable and diverse corps of future principals.
Aspiring principals need pre-service training that prepares them to lead improved instruction and school change, not just manage buildings.
Districts should do more to exercise their power to raise the quality of principal training, so that graduates better meet their needs.
States could make better use of their power to influence the quality of leadership training through standard-setting, program accreditation, principal certification and financial support for highly qualified candidates.
Especially in their first year on the job, principals need high-quality mentoring and professional development tailored to individual and district needs.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/school-leadership/effective-principal-leadership/Pages/The-Making-of-the-Principal-Five-Lessons-in-Leadership-Training.aspx

New Framework for Principal Evaluation Challenges National Model

Posted on May 21, 2012 by coreeducation

A new report from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) argues that principal evaluation systems should not be based only on student achievement gains, but on the quality of principal leadership and performance. Additionally, principals and other school-based leaders are being left out of education reform discussions.

The report, called “The Ripple Effect,” also noted that many professional principal organizations and researchers have defined principal effectiveness by the principal’s knowledge, skills, attitudes and behavior that overall produces a certain quality of leadership style.

Key qualities for successful principals include time management, modeling ethical and professional behaviors, showing initiative and persistence, engaging in ongoing professional learning and reflection, using data to inform strategy, judiciously allocating human and financial resources, and censuring compliance with district, state and federal policy.

The report also observes that in many ways policy efforts have outpaced research on principal effectiveness and evaluation design. This has led to a situation where teacher evaluation systems are being applied to principal evaluations, and therefore the principal evaluations are too heavily focused on effectiveness measures that “don’t capture the entire role of a school leader.”

To be useful, principal evaluations should also focus on measuring work quality, school climate, and instructional quality—aspects directly influenced by school leadership. Principals are the second most influential factor on student achievement after teaching quality, and therefore as policymakers strive to design principal evaluation systems, they need to be sure they are using multiple measures specifically targeted to school leadership. Failure to do so will result in invalid measures and little progress towards improving schools.

To read the full report, please visit http://www.air.org/news/index.cfm?fa=viewContent&content_id=1879

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Proven Strategies for Designing Principal Evaluations

Posted on May 3, 2012 by coreeducation

What makes for an effective principal, and how can effectiveness be measured? Thirty states have recently passed legislation to improve principal evaluation systems and are now grappling with these questions. New legislation recognizes that leadership is the second most influential factor in student achievement, after classroom teaching, but there is a lack of agreement about how principal evaluation systems can be designed to be fair, supportive, and legally defensible.

Now, after years of study, researchers at American Institutes for Research (AIR) and the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality (TQ Center) have developed a cutting-edge, free resource for principal design.

The online resource, Practical Guide to Designing Comprehensive Principal Evaluation Systems: A Tool to Assist in the Development of Principal Evaluation Systems, begins by comparing different models in use in districts and states across the country (state-level, elective state-level, and district systems with required parameters). The authors then explain eight components that must be in place to have an effective principal evaluation system. These components are:

1a) Specifying evaluation system goals

1b) Defining principal effectiveness and establishing standards

2) Securing and sustaining stakeholder investment and cultivating a strategic communication plan

3) Selecting measures

4) Determining the structure of the system

5) Selecting and training evaluators

6) Ensuring data integrity and transparency

7) Using evaluation results

8) Evaluating the system

Online resources include interactive guides and additional resources to support development of principal evaluation systems.

To view these resources, please visit http://www.tqsource.org/PracticalGuidePrincipals/

Call to States: Revolutionize Teacher and Principal Prep

Posted on April 25, 2012 by coreeducation

In a recent meeting of the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) to share ideas on how best to implement the Common Core, executive director of CCSSO Gene Wilhoit delivered a frank message: states need to take stronger positions on regulating teacher preparation and licensing standards within their jurisdiction and need to utilize their ability to collect and publicize data that show how well those programs are doing. Without such measures, the Common Core will fail.

“If we are honest with ourselves, we know we are not ready to deliver against this promise [of the Common Core]. The vast majority of teachers don’t have the skill set” needed to teach to the new expectations. In order to ensure that the new standards do what they are supposed to, teachers need support to improve both their pedagogical skills and their content knowledge, he said.

However, Wilhoit was quick to emphasize that states should not impose pedagogical methods on teachers, but empower them to attain the needed skills and content knowledge. Principal preparation needs particular attention as well, he said. Current educational programs do not prepare school leaders to “walk through classrooms and recognize the kind of teaching that should be taking place to reflect the new standards.”

Three key levers can be used by states as they begin to implement the Common Core. One is the power to approve teacher prep programs. In many cases, states give this authority to accreditation organizations “that too often emphasize process over content.” Second, states have authority over teacher-licensing programs, which gives them power to examine candidates fully. Finally, states can collect and publicize data about teacher and principal prep programs that will “show how well they are doing their jobs.” Programs that are not producing high-quality teachers should not continue to be sanctioned by the state.

The point of the Common Core, Wilhoit concluded, is to ensure that teaching and learning is improved “at scale” in state education systems, rather than for only a few. “The work depends on impacting all teachers, not just a few. This is systems work, and we are the system.”

The "Core" of Education

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