How essential is a principal to the educational enterprise of a school today? Unbelievably essential! The Effective Educator era reinforces the principal as the person responsible for leading a successful school. Not only is the principal the chief leader of all that happens in the school, Educator Effectiveness in Wisconsin places 50% of the overall evaluation of every teacher in the hands of the principal. For everything and everyone, principal leadership is unbelievably essential.
Historically, the principal was the “principal or lead” teacher of a school faculty. Over time the principalship was formalized and legally recognized as the leader of a school. Educational statutes in most states recognize four entities in a school district: Board of Education, superintendent, principal, and teachers. Almost all statutes relating to the supervision of children and the employment supervision of teachers refer to the school principal as the supervisor. Research abounds regarding the role of a school principal. Effective School Research in the 1980s affirmed that “if the principal is not engaged in an initiative, the initiative fails from the beginning.” Although recent Essential Schools’ research attempted to replace principal leadership with collegial and collaborative leadership spread out among teachers, the need for “chief” leadership has remained immutable. There is theory and there is reality.
http://www.essentialschools.org/resources/92
A test for identifying school leadership can be derived from Hollywood’s Miracle on 42nd Street. Send a letter to any school addressed to the “Person in Charge of the School” and the letter will wind up on the principal’s desk, or with a chuckle, on the principal’s secretary’s desk. There is a Santa and there is a school principal.
There are many ways in which a principal is the school’s “chief”. I like two recent pieces aired on NPR’s Marketplace. Kai Ryssdal and NPR reporters asked, “What does a CEO do all day?” and “What is the point of a COO? A CEO? A CVO? A CKO?” They provide us with several insightful examples of the importance of the “chief.”
The common denominator in the workday of any chief is meetings. Meetings are the way in which the chief keeps groups inside and outside the organization focused on the organizational mission. Meetings are the inter-relational connecting point between the leader and the people being led. Meetings clarify and transmit a common understanding of information and organizational objectives. “He (or she) is in a meeting” is what most people hear when they attempt to contact the chief.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/business/ive-always-wondered/what-do-ceos-do-all-day
There are many areas of expertise that a chief must possess in order to be an effective leader. The NPR report labeled five areas using very unique yet highly informative descriptors. I find that the NPR descriptions also are apt illustrators of a school principal. These are:
Chief Agility Officer. Schools no longer are the monoliths of the 19th and 20th centuries. In this century, school leadership and school faculties must be highly adaptive to constant change. Government, business, and local communities do not hesitate to forcefully legislate or subtly redirect a school’s educational programs. Special interests rule in all too many discussions of how schools are failing and what they must do to create success for the future. An agile leadership is necessary for schools to interpret and respond to incessant change.
Chief Knowledge Officer. The principal is seldom the most intelligent or intellectual member of the faculty but always is the person who is “supposed to know.” If there are two questions that a principal hears more than any others they are “What do you want me to do now?” or “What are we supposed to do with or about …?” Leadership resides in the knowledge of what do or in the connections to the sources of that knowledge. This is different that an Information or Technical Director. Those are specialties and provide definitive and short-term answers. The CKO responds to the now and future issues as they reflect the educational mission of the school.
Chief Networking Officer. A school no longer operates as an island in the educational sea. Parents “helicopter” in and out of school. Local industry wants school graduates trained and ready for immediate employment. Governors want a world class education that will energize a state’s economy. Children want to learn and be happy. There are ways in which these seemingly disparate needs and wants fit together and the principal must be able to connect the dots and tie the laces.
Chief Visionary Officer. As interested as a teacher may be in the future of education, the teacher’s focus circles around lesson plans, unit designs and the next “big” test. Someone in the school must constantly steer the school toward a picture of what the future looks like. Principals must work in the today while looking well beyond tomorrow.
Chief Electrification Officer. This is not just the person responsible for turning on and off the school’s lights. The Electrification Officer pushes the “go” button for everything in the school from the annual school calendar, assignment of the faculty and staff, student schedules, clock and bell schedules, athletic and arts events, and recesses and vacations. Like an old time wagon master, the principal says “Head ‘em up and roll ‘em out” every school day.
These five descriptors are categorical. A principalship may also be painted by function and one of the most significant functions has recently jumped from the many to #1 in Wisconsin schools. The principal is responsible for assigning a numeric value that represents 50% of a teacher’s professional employment evaluation. The responsibility for a teacher evaluation is not new; it is described in the educational statutes. In the pre-Effective Educator era, a school district or school or principal formulated an idiosyncratic definition of an effective teacher. That definition usually referenced a set of teacher standards and assessed a teacher’s professional work through the lens of research or an instructional model. For a decade or more, Madeline Hunter’s Instructional Design, was the basis for examining a teacher’s instructional competence. There were other models used, but there was not a statewide, mandated template for assessing educator effectiveness.
Today a school district and its schools use a single model for evaluating a teacher’s effectiveness. And, the principal is the sole person holding up that template to see how a teacher’s instructional practices match with that model. At the end of an assessment, the principal will assign a single numeric value to represent the quality of the teacher’s educational effectiveness.
Perhaps we should add a position to the NPR list of what a chief does.
Chief Deciding Officer. This role sounds like President G. W. Bush when he proclaimed, “I’m the decider.” The principal must decide whether or not a teacher is an effective educator and assign a number to distinguish that level of effectiveness.
In his History of the World, Part 1 (1981), Mel Brooks said, “It’s good to be the king” as he reveled in his life as the one and only Louis XVI. It also is good to be the principal, the one and only chief of a school. The singularity of being the chief also carries much responsibility. Knowing that a principal today is unbelievably essential to the success of a school and the professional life its faculty, I amend the Brooks’ quote, “It is hard to be a good king (chief).”