Finding the principal within

It's a hot Friday night in June, and the air conditioning in the old classroom at Saint John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., is not particularly effective. The students, clustered around three large tables, are sipping cold drinks and fanning themselves with scraps of paper.

But despite the less-than-ideal conditions, these 26 men and women - Rochester teachers who just hours before finished a week of teaching in their own classrooms - represent the brightest hope of their public school district.

This select group of talented teachers has come together in a program that addresses one of the district's most pressing needs: to fill principals' chairs.

All across America, in school systems large and small, there is a crisis in the making. According to estimates by the Department of Labor, 40 percent of the 93,200 principals in the United States will soon be retiring. Vacancies in principals' offices are expected to leap 10 to 20 percent by the end of 2005.

Yet the number of people interested in filling the jobs - particularly in urban areas like Rochester - has dwindled.

For one thing, principals' salaries have failed to keep pace with increases in teaching stipends, with principals often earning little more than top teachers. Pressures have also escalated in the form of greater behavioral problems among ever-younger children, burgeoning numbers of lawsuits, and larger non-English-speaking populations.

Add to that the growing tendency to judge schools and administrators by student test scores, and many talented educators no longer see any reason to jump into the principal track.

"It doesn't pay as well as it used to and you get dumped on all the time," says Thomas Sobol, a professor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. "Who needs it?"

The lack of interest is prompting districts around the country to take action.

Jefferson County in Louisville, Ky., has collaborated with local colleges to offer related classes. In Texas, parts of Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio have begun training at the district level. About a dozen states now also offer alternative certification routes for principals.

The team approach

In Rochester, the public school system and Saint John Fisher College have created a program to shape a new crop of principals for local schools. The course is tailored to fit the schedules of teachers - with Friday night and Saturday sessions over three semesters and one summer. For those who get through the rigorous screening process, tuition costs are reduced by 60 percent.

In return, the candidates are asked for a promise to work as a principal in Rochester for at least five years if they are successful in the program.

Time for an overhaul

Even apart from the numbers crunch, say observers, an overhaul of the entire process of training principals is long overdue. Newly minted programs like Rochester's offer a chance to rethink and retool.

The immediate advantages of a district-based program like Rochester's include:

*Training grounded in the daily realities of the job.

"The training programs as they were designed in earlier years were grossly inadequate," says Franklin Dean Grant, executive director of human resources for the DeKalb County school system in Georgia. "[Principals] need a course in public relations, a course in school law. They need a thorough understanding of budgeting and finance and accounting."

The Rochester program is taught not from a textbook but from a series of case studies. The instructors are both former principals who have gone on to work as superintendents - Sam Walton, superintendent of the Berkshire Union Free School District in Canaan, N.Y., and Fran Murphy, superintendent of New York's Rome City School District. The informality of the class sessions also allows for a fair amount of good-natured give-and-take between them and their students.

Page: 1 | 2