Besides teachers, principals are the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement. Principals ensure a safe and healthy setting for students to learn; they supervise, train and evaluate teachers; and are increasingly involved as instructional leaders. Many schools, especially low-performing ones, are appropriately turning to principals to make more budgetary, calendar and curricular decisions. Principals, more than anyone else in an educational environment, often know the particular needs of a school.

Federal public policy should include a greater focus on school principals, such as supporting stronger professional development; more meaningful performance evaluations; and improving the lowest-performing schools. Clearly, some administrative duties need to remain at the district level with superintendents, their central office staff and the school board. These responsibilities include policy development, staff distribution, accountability compliance, and inter-governmental relationships. As building leaders who are closest to students, however, principals must be constantly aware of their classroom teachers’ effects on student learning, including which instructional and curricular approaches are working and not working. In addition, principals have to protect students’ rights and safety; enforce codes of conduct; and implement district and state policies because of their presence in the school building.

Growth in student achievement relies on principals engaged as instructional leaders in terms of consistent analysis of students’ assessment results, achievement gaps and school engagement, both at an individual level and a classroom level. Embedded in those efforts are principals’ critical role in identifying problems, successes and solutions in attendance, student discipline, retention, grade promotion, gifted and talented and special education, grading policies, dropout risks, under-credited students, graduation and college readiness, and overall school climate. More than any individual teacher, principals are in the key position to be able to articulate this information at a macro level to district- and state-level decision-makers in order for them to improve the learning outcomes throughout the school and district.

In this context, federal and state policy must increase the focus on helping principals with these responsibilities through quality professional development and relevant performance evaluations. We are seeing new laws in many states and pending legislation in others, but the federal government has a role in promoting and supporting state efforts with funding and baseline requirements for states to implement in a way that best meets their local needs. Several pending bills in Congress would address these issues in the areas of principal professional development, evaluations and school turnaround, but these bills appear stalled in the wider partisan stalemate of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

I have introduced the Great Teaching for Great Schools Act once again this Congress, which would provide comprehensive, quality, ongoing professional development for educators, including teachers and principals, aligning strategies with student learning goals. The legislation would increase principals’ involvement and leadership in school-wide professional development. Senator Michael Bennet has proposed two bills to increase the number of effective principals, and one of these, the LEAD Act of which I’m a cosponsor in the House, would focus this pipeline on low-performing schools in turnaround status.

Because of the principal’s extraordinary influence over school success, the Obama administration has indeed called for principals in these lowest-performing five percent of schools to be replaced if their school is not showing successful student academic outcomes or significant progress toward such outcomes. This approach, encompassed in my legislation (the Achieving Change in Education – ACE - Act), exempts principals from replacement who have been at a school for less than three years and who have begun reforms.

Despite continuous skepticism of and resistance to the administration’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) approach among beltway and school district critics, recent data has shown improved student outcomes in these schools. A new Center on Education Policy study found that 25 out of 45 states using the SIG transformation model said that replacing the principal is to a great extent or some extent a key element to improving student achievement. The U.S. Department of Education’s recently reported data showed double digit math score increases in over a quarter of turnaround schools and improved reading and math proficiency among 60 percent of students. Children throughout the nation who are enrolled in the most failing schools cannot wait for five years for their schools to get better. A first grader will be in sixth grade by then, but will have lost all that time to poor learning opportunities. All students should have a chance to compete and live productive lives.

Finally, there has been so much talk about the need to properly and fairly evaluate teacher performance, but too often principals are left out of this discussion. In fact, the recent bill adopted by the House Education and the Workforce Committee omitted any evaluation of principals. In Colorado, principals must now be annually evaluated and they must include their students’ assessment performance and growth. A bill that I have co-led (STELLAR – Securing Teacher Effectiveness in Leadership, Learning and Results) would establish meaningful teacher and principal evaluations based significantly on student assessment growth and ensure that they play a role in personnel decisions.

Yes, principals must remain instruction leaders and ensure that teachers are supporting student learning outcomes. At the same time, principals also can help improve these outcomes by taking on appropriate administrative roles that directly impact students. The federal government has a role in this movement by fostering effective state and local policies to support principals, hold them accountable and empower them to strengthen academic results.

The new report from the Center on Public Education is further confirmation that principals are integral to the daily work of schools, and that the work of principals is changing. We agree with many of the previous posts, but want to note additional research raises serious concerns about our principal workforce and our investment in systems for supporting current and future school leaders. For example, a report from AIR’s National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research by Susanna Loeb and her colleagues indicates that urban principals are not staying in schools—particularly schools with low student achievement—for very long, and that their departure from the school or the profession hurts school progress. A recent report by AIR’s REL Midwest and another report by RAND suggest principal attrition rates are increasing.

The research findings raise an important point: How are we supporting principals so that the best educational leaders opt to enter and remain as principals? At AIR, we continue to work collaboratively with school districts and state policymakers to ensure compelling evidence informs meaningful change. We view improved principal evaluation systems as part of a comprehensive strategy for leadership support. States and districts need to be supported in their efforts to improve principal performance evaluation systems through research and consultation, which we do through our Performance Management Advantage and other Quality School Leadership services. Next week, we will release a new, free resource called the Guide to Designing Comprehensive Principal Evaluation Systems (www.tqsource.org) that provides states and districts with a step-by-step process for meeting federal/state requirements for fair, rigorous, and useful performance evaluations. And we are continuing to conduct Consumer Reports-like reviews of available evaluation instruments so that policymakers can select the highest quality instruments to measure principal practices. Its through the thoughtful use of such research-informed guides that the leaders of leaders in our education system can create the conditions for principals to achieve their visions for their schools’ success.

Here is a response from Michael Haberman, president of PENCIL, an education nonprofit in New York City.

A new report from the Center for Public Education confirms that a principal's leadership is just as integral to a school's success as a CEO's is to their business. In the massive longitudinal study Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago, researchers found that school leadership is one of five essential ingredients in the recipe for school success. A few years ago, The Wallace Foundation published a report based on six years of research confirming that leadership is second only to classroom instruction as an influence on student learning. These studies are critically important but they confirm what we instinctually know; while school leadership is more important than ever, it's also more complicated than ever.

Principals are expected to attract and retain talented staff, build morale among their employees and students, manage multimillion-dollar budgets, improve productivity, encourage employee excellence and create a vision and strategic plan. Many also contend with boosting parent engagement, building a school brand to increase student applications and working with multiple external groups from unions to the media to community-based organizations. Yet, unlike CEOs, principals often do not get the upfront -- and ongoing -- training they need to be successful. With some exceptions, the typical principal often begins as a teacher, becomes a vice-principal and then a principal, but doesn't get the management training needed to run a complex organization. No successful private sector company appoints a CEO who hasn't been groomed for the job. And once appointed, most CEOs receive ongoing professional development and support. Corporations invest in their leaders so that they are prepared for and can succeed in their positions. Our principals deserve the same support as our business leaders.

But who can provide this training, this unique insight into the new role of the CEO principal? While the question is a complex one and surely policy changes should reflect the needs of our schools “key ingredients”, at PENCIL we are not waiting for a policy shift. Over the past 15 years, we have connected thousands of private sector volunteers with thousands of public school leaders. We have seen tremendous success stories where volunteers have literally helped transform a school from a case study of failure into a model of success. CEOs and other business leaders who handle management and operational issues day-to-day can be a part of the solution. I've seen business leaders across sectors -- from financial executives to fashion icons to record label executives to independent consultants -- begin partnerships with NYC public school principals and get results. From one leader to another, their partnership provides the space for a personal exchange of ideas, advice and insight. Private sector volunteers are able to share a business-like acumen that often helps principals assess their approach to many aspects of their business-like work, such as strategic planning, team-building, staff retention, effective use of data and evaluation, effective communication techniques, and budgeting and oversight, all issues which our principals’ new reality.

Principals are critically important to the success of our schools. Given the reality of their evolving roles we must give this issue more attention. But while we discuss it, let’s provide them the support they need and deserve.

The latest report from the Center for Public Education reinforces what we know from decades of research and our own 10 years of experience recruiting, developing and supporting school leaders: the principal is a critical lever for driving improvement at the school level, especially in schools that are struggling.

As discussed in the report, the principal’s role has changed dramatically over the past couple of decades. Great principals set the school’s tone and culture, develop and support effective teachers, build a shared vision of success and act as the primary instructional leader. It’s time for the policies that support principals to catch up to the realities of the job. Laws and regulations that govern how principals are prepared, certified, hired, evaluated and professionally developed need to align with a strong vision of principal effectiveness – and districts and states need the resources to make this possible through increased investments in school leadership through vehicles such as Title II.

As others have noted, policymakers and the media have rightly focused recent attention on teacher quality and accountability. However, these and other reforms – including the Common Core State Standards Initiative – will be at risk of failing if we don’t also focus on principal quality and accountability. Principals are the school-level funnel through which all other reforms flow. Implementation will succeed or fail by their efforts, from engaging in rigorous teacher evaluations that provide teachers actionable, ongoing feedback that supports their development to leveraging new standards to raise instructional rigor in the classroom. While the education field is beginning to acknowledge the vital importance of school leadership, too many states and districts lack thoughtful strategies for how to cultivate highly effective principals – especially for turnaround schools and schools serving high-need students.

How do school systems build the capacity of principals to play the much more significant role we now ask of them and by extension effectively implement a variety of bold human capital reforms? They need to:

• Create strong pipelines of future school leaders by cultivating the talents of successful teachers and other instructional leaders, and break down barriers to entry for candidates with the skills and experience connected to successful school leadership;
• Offer high-quality principal training that develops the mindsets and skill sets required for the complex job of leading a successful public school and ensures that candidates have significant adult leadership responsibilities and practice during their preparation;
• Provide effective support and evaluation systems for principals once on the job, as well as develop their managers to provide timely and appropriate feedback; and
• Design aligned state and local policies that grant principals the autonomies they need to lead effectively and fulfill their responsibility to raise student achievement; this includes aligning the expectations of a principal’s role with pipeline development, standards for principal preparation programs, and goals of evaluation and support systems.

We are working with partner districts and states across the country on these areas and strongly encourage all districts and states to engage in this work.

The bottom line is that dramatically improving our public schools and fulfilling the promise of public education depends on leadership. Yes, we absolutely need to focus on teacher quality initiatives and raise our curricular standards for students. But all of these efforts will be led at the school level by the principal, so we need to make sure that this person is both highly skilled and well supported. At the federal, state and local levels, we need to prioritize the principal and the policies that will unleash the potential of this role to transform our schools.

While teachers play a significant role in student learning, principals play an equally significant role in supporting and developing teachers’ capacities. Principals are both administrative and instructional leaders, and they need better preparation and more flexibility to succeed in those roles.

Currently, preparation for principals isn’t any better than it is for teachers – but we don’t hear nearly as much discussion about it. Principals typically earn master’s degrees in educational leadership. These program tend to devote more time to issues like educational law and school financing than to the daily demands of today’s school leaders in areas such as accountability, school improvement, parent and community engagement, and the recruitment and selection of teachers. Many principal training programs also lack opportunities for quality on-the-job learning. Many principals also lack preparation for working with particular grade spans, leaving them unknowledgeable about what they should see and hear in a first grade classroom, for example, as opposed to a seventh grade classroom.

There are new alternative principal training models, such as New Leaders for New Schools, working to better address the needs of prospective principals. Still, the majority of principals continue to come out of traditional preparation programs that leave them underprepared for the job ahead – especially for those who will be assigned to struggling schools.

Principals also need more flexibility when it comes to their school’s budget, staffing, professional development for teachers and other needs. In some cases, principals don’t have much control over who is teaching in their school. That doesn’t make any sense. Principals should be able to hire and place in the classroom whomever they deem most qualified and skilled to meet the needs of the children in their school. Principals should also have the flexibility to hire additional staff if necessary to take on administrative and operational duties, so they can focus more on curriculum and instruction.

In today’s reform climate, many principals are tasked with turning around underperforming schools. In struggling schools, especially, principals matter even more. As a former teacher from Florida, I still have lots of teacher contacts one of whom shared a real-life experience with me. Consider this situation: (The names of the school and principals have been changed.)

Florida gives its schools A-F grades based on students’ performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in reading, math and writing. After bouncing between an “F” and a “D” for several years, Sunshine Elementary School received a new principal. The principal was a dynamic leader and after three years of steady gains moved the school to an “A.” Because of her success, the principal was moved to another “low-performing” school and because she was a strong, supportive leader, several teachers went with her.

A new principal, Mr. Jackson was assigned to Sunshine. Mr. Jackson had not previously worked in a low-performing school, nor had he ever led an elementary school. In fact, he was a first year principal. In general, the teachers did not feel supported by Mr. Jackson and the students did not get along well with him. During his tenure, the school plummeted to a “D” and then again down to an “F.” He was reassigned and a new principal, Mrs. Jones, replaced him.

The teachers felt like Mrs. Jones was a breath of fresh air. She regularly stated the importance of placing strong teachers in the early grades. She was firm but fair. She visited classrooms frequently and met with teachers on a regular basis to discuss their strengths and weaknesses. She established community partnerships to connect children and families to services. The students recognized her as strict but caring, and respected her. The school again was on the path toward improving and achieving an “A” once again. But after Mrs. Jones’s second year, she was asked to take a new position assisting other low-performing schools across the state.

Once again, Sunshine had a new principal. The students didn’t like her and teacher morale plummeted. Behavior problems rose, even though they dropped significantly under Mrs. Jones’s tenure. The atmosphere in the school became tense. Sunshine Elementary School’s grade dropped once more.

(A version of this story also appeared on Early Ed Watch, a blog from the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation.)

Keeping strong, well-trained, capable leaders in the schools with the most challenges is key. Equally important is giving principals more control over school-level decisions. Of course, a strong principal is not the only factor that matters in school improvement, but I believe it is a factor that does not get nearly enough attention.

Here is a guest response from Barbara Crock, director of School Leadership at New Teacher Center.

It’s a job that just keeps growing and growing. No matter how well prepared, most new principals today find the role invigorating, all consuming, often overwhelming and ever evolving. The role continues to transform from building manager to instructional leader to human capital manager and developer. Today’s school leaders are continuously integrating multiple systems to maintain a laser-like focus on student achievement. They juggle evaluating, supporting and retaining effective teachers; creating effective teaching and learning conditions; driving instructional change; performing data-driven analysis of student achievement; addressing student learning needs both academically and social-emotionally; and actively engaging the community. The Center on Public Policy’s recent report is clear; even the best leaders need time before the results of their labors are evident. But we can accelerate this learning curve for new principals by putting systems of support in place that include job-embedded coaching by well-trained and supported leadership coaches. We need to focus on principals, so our teachers succeed.

Take this example. Within the past two years, nearly one-third of principals in Chicago Public Schools and Hillsborough County Public Schools (FL) are new to the role of the principal, and the majority serve in high-poverty, high-minority schools. During the past two years, New Teacher Center has partnered with both of these large urban districts to create systems of support for new teachers and new principals. Both districts have invested in supporting new principals as part of a comprehensive talent management system by building out robust first-year induction programs for new school leaders.

In the process of doing this work, we learned three investments matter: 1) Expanding the role of the supervisor of the new school leader from solely managing schools to include developing principals and school leadership teams; 2) Building peer principal relationships through the use of trained experienced principal coaches who provide just-in-time, job-embedded learning and facilitating peer cohorts to share emerging professional practice and provide the social-emotional supports to strengthen resiliency and personal persistence; and 3) Assisting new school leaders in intentionally and effectively providing feedback and direction to teachers, staff, students and community members from the first day on the job.

Initial results are strong: More than 94% of the participants in Chicago’s 2010-2011 program felt they were more effective as a principal due to their participation in induction program services. Furthermore, 2010-2011 summative data collected from the same program participants indicate that 68% of new principals exceeded the district average for improvements on student outcomes measured by the Illinois Standard Achievement Test (ISAT).

Our students do not have three or four years to wait for their teachers to develop, nor do our teachers have three or four years to wait for our new leaders to become proficient in leading schools and systems of instruction. If we want to target our supports towards students and teachers, we must begin by building robust comprehensive induction systems for new principals focused on helping them strengthen the culture of teaching and learning while simultaneously serving as a developer of teachers. Investing in support for new principals represents one of the greatest opportunities for improving school performance.

One of the reasons principals are among my heroes is because of their diverse client list rivaling that of almost any other occupation: students, parents, superintendents and researchers, the business community and sometimes even the justice system.

Is it any wonder that the Center for Public Education has produced a report declares that the job feels undoable? As the editor notes, cinema have given us unrealistic, divergent archetypes of either the disrespected bumbler or the domineering manipulator. In the past, many successful principals in real life have resembled charismatic superwomen and supermen, building managers who have command and control over their staffs and schools, and have the confidence of parents.

But today, principals must become more collaborative, evolving with the needs of students, faculty and the varying demands heaped upon him or her. This requires seeing the job through a different lens.

While a principal’s job as described above may certainly seem “undoable,” when schools become student-centered learning environments, principals have flexibility to focus on a primary function: instructional leadership. When this happens, the job not only becomes achievable, students begin to acquire the knowledge and skills that are essential for college and the careers of tomorrow.

Lydia Dobyns, president of New Tech Network, one of KnowledgeWorks' high school development subsidiaries, agrees that it does take four to five years for change to become long lasting and to see clear evidence that student outcomes are improved. To that end, she said: “We need good policies and practices that reward change management, long-term student outcome improvements and professional development for principals that provides them with the tools and practices they need to lead.”

To be sure, the things we associate with the best principals haven’t changed; our learning environments and our expectations have.

The principals who create student-centered learning environments through close collaboration with their staffs will produce high-achieving students who are ready for what comes next.

Here is a guest response from Kerri Briggs, director of education reform at the George W. Bush Institute.

Among the nearly 100,000 public schools, there are more than 3.1 million teachers in the US. These teachers are at the heart of every reform effort focused on improving student outcomes. While we know teachers are the most critical factor to improve student achievement, there has not been enough focus in public policy discussions on the similarly critical role of principals ensuring effective teaching and thus driving school improvement. Teachers across our country are supported by more than 90,000 principals.

Research is showing us that the role of the principal is vital. Children need to have effective teachers year after year in order to succeed, and the principal is the best positioned to ensure successive years of quality teaching for each child. Exemplary principals hire, develop and retain effective teachers, while releasing those who are not meeting the needs of their students. Moreover, teacher effectiveness at scale cannot be achieved until schools become the kinds of places where teachers can learn in practice how to meet their students’ needs– and this requires outstanding principals who can model effective instruction and create the kind of climate where teachers feel supported and able to learn from one another. These essential skills are required in any kind of school, whether it is an elementary or secondary school, a high performing or struggling school.

Recognizing the need to select, develop and support principals, the George W. Bush Institute (GWBI) launched the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership (AREL) to promote the significance of school principals in leading and sustaining school improvement and student achievement outcomes. We selected 18 innovative programs with strong principal preparation models to join the AREL Network. The group includes Achievement First, ED Entrepreneurship Center at SMU, Gwinnett County Public Schools, KIPP, New Leaders, New York City Leadership Academy, and the University of Illinois (Chicago) among others. These programs are all committed to graduating highly effective principals who can drive student achievement in their buildings. Collectively, these programs are developing nearly 1,000 principals on an annual basis.

For our nation’s future, we need to focus the same national attention on our principals as we have been giving our teachers over the last few years. The AREL Network programs are teaching us a great deal about what needs to shift in the conditions and policies to accelerate principal success in the role. Principal autonomy over teacher hiring and firing, having the ability to spend time in the classroom observing teachers and providing them with real-time feedback, and limiting a principal’s focus on non-value added administrative duties will be critical if principals can effectively lead their schools.

The idea that school principals ought to be instructional leaders as well as site managers has been championed for decades. But the reality has never quite matched the rhetoric. One reason is that the concept is vague and situational—instructional leadership looks different, and requires different skills, at a high performing school than it does at a dispirited school held back by inertia and incompetence. That means it’s sometimes hard to discern. Another is that most principals are so busy with important but ancillary duties such as compiling data for the district or state, raising money, keeping parents happy, disciplining students, and coordinating schedules that they have little time left in their 50 or 60 or 70 hour work weeks for paying attention to instruction. Of course principals must keep close track of test scores these days, but that’s hardly the same as exhibiting professional leadership.

For the past 5 or more years, policy makers have been obsessed with improving the effectiveness of teachers to boost student learning. That makes sense, given the outsized influence they have. New policies on teacher evaluations, tenure, compensation and professional development have resulted. Those policies not only change the career trajectories of teachers, they also change the job of the principal. Many principals now are expected to be in classrooms observing teachers hundreds of hours per year, and to spend hundreds of more hours documenting what they see, providing feedback to teachers, and filing reports to the district. The judgments they make about performance are the fulcrum of improvement. Yet, they also can cause discontent and even force principals to defend their decisions in front of a judge or arbitrator.

But principals don’t do this work on their own. The popular cinematic image of successful principals as charismatic go-it-alone heroes who defy micro-managing central office bureaucrats and rid schools of malingering teachers has always been a fiction. Many principals today have more help than ever before, especially those who lead schools instituting new evaluation systems based in part on observations. In addition to the usual supporting cast of assistant principals, resource specialists, and coaches, these instructional teams can include data coaches, psychologists, mentor teachers, social workers, counselors and, importantly, evaluators who perform many of the classroom observations.

Good principals lead these teams but also empower them to exercise leadership themselves. As researchers at the University of Washington have said, some principals are “one-man bands,” others are like the front man for a jazz combo who sets the general direction and lets the other musicians improvise, and some are the school could be thought of as “ ‘orchestral leaders,’ skilled in helping large teams produce a coherent sound, while encouraging soloists to shine.” As Karen Seashore-Louis of the University of Minnesota has found, all of the educators in successful schools have more influence over school decisions than is found in unsuccessful ones. And, as in any other field that involves the exercise of judgment, teachers need to feel autonomy, but within a clear set of expectations, to be fully engaged and effective.

This, then, is the paradox of instructional leadership. The strongest and most effective principals are those who let the teachers and other educators lead, having created a shared vision of what it means to be successful, and working to prevent other distractions from getting in the way. It turns out that being an instructional leader is a lot like being a good leader of any organization

The greatest problem with our policies toward principals isn’t that we hold them responsible for too much, too quickly, it’s that we don’t give them the power to accomplish much at all.
A school head today is accountable for student achievement, discipline, the quality of instruction, leading the staff team, and much, much more. Yet that same principal controls only a fragment of his school's budget, has little say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself.
How has it come to this and why does this folly persist?
A dysfunctional governance structure for public education pays homage to "local control" yet turns over management to burgeoning central office bureaucracies, rather than vesting real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents.
We’ve also layered so many responsibilities onto our schools that imparting basic skills and essential knowledge has nearly vanished under efforts to rectify injustice, foster diversity, provide multiple services to kids with varying needs, prevent drug abuse, and on and on.
And anytime something goes wrong, a blizzard of new rules and procedures gets added to the school's constraints, lest that mishap recur anywhere else.
This gigantic mismatch between responsibility and authority has no simple remedy. What's needed is radical simplification, replacing rules with responsibility on the part of the people running our schools. If we don't give principals the authority to do their jobs, we are going to have few competent leaders for our schools, which means we're not going to have many effective schools or well-educated children just when we need them more than ever.