If I Knew Then What I Know Now: Today’s Principalship

 by Frederick Brown, director of strategy and development for Learning Forward, and a former senior program officer for the Wallace Foundation
 
It has been almost 20 years since I began my principalship, and it’s incredible to me how much has changed in what we expect from our school leaders.
I was trained as a building manager, and my success was often measured by keeping operations and procedures running smoothly. Someone once told me, “Just make sure your school isn’t on the front page of the newspaper because of something negative, and you’ll be seen as a good principal.” Yes, I was expected to know instruction and support teachers, but my main work was focused on things like budgets and making sure the central office received their completed reports on time. Indeed, so much has changed!
Around the time that I was exiting my principalship, the Wallace Foundation was beginning its intense focus on leadership. In ways that no funder had done before, Wallace began asking the question: “What do effective principals do, and how do school systems and states support them?” By investing heavily in states and districts across the country while also commissioning research to uncover lessons from that work, Wallace got the field talking extensively about leadership.
Last year, the Wallace Foundation reflected on all of that work and asked itself the question, “What’s our perspective on what great principals do?” It made sense for Wallace to pose that question and offer its own assessment on what makes for a great leader. That perspective, The School Principal as Leader: Guiding Schools to Better Teaching and Learning, begins
    Education 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.

What a powerful opening and reminder about the real work of today’s school principals. The perspective goes on to highlight what effective principals do including:

• 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

In the midst of the national focus on leadership, school districts are realizing more and more how important it is to clearly define their own expectations for leaders and then align their pre-service work, hiring, induction, evaluation, and ongoing professional learning systems to those expectations. Central offices are recognizing more and more how important it is to support school leaders and their leadership teams and do everything to ensure they remained focused on teaching and learning. So much has changed during these 20 years.

Frederick Brown will expand on this topic at NASSP's Ignite '15 conference in San Diego, Feb. 19-21