Principal Recruitment Another Move in Reform

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee likes to tell a story about one of her principals who pledged to improve student achievement scores by 43 percentage points by the end of the school year.

How? Rhee asked.

" 'I'm going to pray,' " the principal said, according to Rhee.

"It showed me," Rhee recently told the Washington-based Institute for Education, "that there's a very significant disconnect with some of our school leaders in really understanding what challenges they're up against."

Boosting the D.C. public schools' principal corps is a critical component of Rhee's and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's (D) strategy to reform the city's troubled school system, where about two-thirds of its 49,600 students have poor reading and math skills. Rhee has embarked on an aggressive $180,000 national advertising campaign to recruit high-performing principals who have dramatically helped students learn.

"We expect that given where our schools are, we need people who know what success looks like and can translate that into immediate gains in student achievement," said Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who is supervising the recruitment efforts.

Those efforts are in step with a larger national movement in which public and private institutions are spending millions on training the next generation of principals to turn around low-performing schools.

Rhee has met individually with the 17 interim principals to determine whether they will be eligible to apply for permanent jobs next year. She will announce her decision soon, Henderson said. After that, parents and teachers will weigh in through principal panel interviews. There may also be additional openings toward the end of the year when other principals find out whether their contracts will be renewed.

Employees have scoured Web sites looking for school leaders who have won national awards, and have cajoled prospective candidates into applying with coffee chats on nights and weekends. Newspaper ads have appeared in The Washington Post and Education Week. As a result of all the efforts, the school system has received about 500 applications, more than double last year's number, Henderson said. And they are still recruiting.

The school system won a $2 million grant from federal officials to assist with recruitment and principal initiatives. The money, which the school system has not received yet, includes $1 million to jump-start an in-house leadership academy, which will offer training for current and future principals and other school leaders, Henderson said.

Education professor Kara Finnigan, who has studied principal leadership in Chicago schools, said her research shows the importance of principals in improving a struggling school. "What the principal does is really make sure that collectively the school operates well," said Finnigan, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester's Warner School of Education.

At the same time, the role of the principal is changing, especially in struggling urban school districts such as Washington's. Richard Laine, the New York based director of education for the Wallace Foundation, which has invested $215 million to research and fund leadership programs for principals, said the job of principal used to boil down to being the person with the most keys, keeping order during lunch and running faculty meetings.