Charter schools suffer leadership shortages

One Sunday in 2009, the principal of Potomac Lighthouse Public Charter School in Northeast Washington called the school’s board to tell them she was quitting. The next day, school officials said, she didn’t come to work.

A national search team immediately placed advertisements in newspapers and on job boards but received just 15 applications. Of those, only five had the qualifications school officials were seeking. And it was already a month into the school year.

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Potomac Lighthouse soon solved its problem — appointing an interim principal before settling on one of the candidates for the permanent position — but such leadership quandaries are growing more common in the District and in other locations where charter-school movements are robust. The supply of skilled, experienced talent is not keeping up with demand.

Charter school supporters say the shortage of high-quality leaders could significantly slow the movement at a time when some 400 new charters are opening annually — creating several hundred top positions that must be filled.

“It is hard to find a good charter leader,” said Regan Kelly, vice president of Lighthouse Academies in the District. “It’s not an easy problem, but it’s one that people need to get their heads around.”

Unlike traditional public schools, most charters don’t have the resources of a school district — such as recruitment teams or pools of resumes — to find new leaders quickly. And turnover at the top level in charters is high. Seventy-one percent of charter leaders plan to leave their positions in the next five years, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell, which studied the issue last year.

There is also a dearth of training programs specifically geared toward charter leaders, who tend to have more responsibilities than their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Experts say good leadership is key to improving student performance. New Leaders for New Schools, a New York-based nonprofit group that prepares principals and other top administrators for urban schools, found in 2009 that more than half of a school’s impact on student achievement can be attributed to principal and teacher effectiveness. In the 2009 study, principals accounted for 25 percent and teachers 33 percent of the effect.

“I think [the leadership shortage] has already substantially throttled the growth” of charter schools, said Eric Premack, director of the Charter Schools Development Center, a Sacramento-based nonprofit group that offers training, resources and technical assistance to charters nationally. “We would have two to three times as many schools operating if we didn’t have this problem.”

One weekday, aspiring principal Danalyn Hypolite and Shawn Hardnett, a leadership coach for the New Leaders for New Schools program in the District, walked down the wide hallways of Paul Public Charter School in Northwest. Each carried a plate of King Cake that Hypolite, a New Orleans native, had brought for the staff.