When Jill Johnson became a principal 10 years ago, the training she had received prepared her for running a school in a time gone by.
“We were trained to work with a pretty homogeneous population,” said Johnson, the principal of Richfield High School, and it was about “giving kids information and evaluating what they do with it.”
No longer: Schools across the country are dealing with more at-risk, poor students and education has become “taking kids where they are and moving them to where they need to be,” Johnson said. When training a principal, “developing talent throughout the career is essential.”
Johnson was among the principals who gathered at Dayton’s Bluff Achievement Plus Elementary in St. Paul on Wednesday to talk to Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., about principal training and recruitment in the United States, and how to put quality leaders in charge of needy schools.
Last month, Franken introduced a bill that would aim to improve how principals are trained and guided throughout their careers. Cosponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and three others, the bill would create competitive five-year matching grants for school districts and their partners to work to recruit and train principals for high-needs schools.
Aspiring principals would do a year-long “residency” in such a school before taking a job. New and experienced principals in the program would agree to spend at least four years at the helm of a high-needs school and receive on-the-job training and mentoring.
“It could make a big difference,” said Arthur Levine, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation and former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. “What the research shows is that the quality of principals makes an enormous difference in terms of student achievement.”
But quality control is key, he said, because in the United States, education levels obtained by educators often translate directly to a pay increase.
“There’s been a tendency for principals and educational administrators to choose those programs that are fastest, and easiest, [and it becomes] a ‘race to the bottom,’” he said.
Nationwide, Levine said, two major problems exist in principal recruitment and training: “The pool of people interested in becoming principals is shrinking, and the quality of preparation for people to become principals is really dreadful.”
Meeting its targets
Dayton’s Bluff, where the meeting was held, is a school on St. Paul’s East Side where 91 percent of the students come from low-income families and 35 percent are still learning English. Despite that, the school meets all of its state education testing targets.
Principal Andrew Collins said after the meeting Wednesday that running the school is a complicated dance of “identifying the collective assets of the whole.” That’s working with all the school’s teachers, parents and employees, while flattening the organization to give teachers more input and studying student data to know where every child stands.
“There are a lot of things coming together,” he said, and “a lot of it is learning on the job.”
Under Franken’s bill, called the “School Principal Recruitment and Training Act of 2009,” the programs established by districts and partners, such as higher education institutions or nonprofits, would need to file annual reports providing data on the people who have received training, as well as how the schools they lead are performing.
Programs performing well would be eligible for grant renewal.
Franken said Wednesday that while the number could change, he would pursue about $200 million annually to operate the program.
“Principal and teacher turnover is a problem,” Franken said in the lobby of Dayton’s Bluff, “and we need well-trained principals and teachers in high-needs schools. … You need real leaders.”
