Fewer step forward to be school principals

Other programs focus on the structure of the job. The Texas Principals Leadership Initiative, which coordinates principal training statewide, is looking at ways to divide the principalship, for instance between business and education duties.

"We need to take a hard look at the job itself and make it something a human being can in fact accomplish," says Vincent Ferrandino, executive director of the National Association of Elementary School Principals. "Right now, you don't have veteran teachers looking at the job and saying, yes, that's something I really want to do because I can make a difference with children."

It's not easy to get agreement on which approaches will be effective. "Solutions are difficult because of differences in perception," says superintendent Cary. "You have fewer and fewer qualified applicants because they think it's too little pay.... Yet there's a ... feeling now in communities and state legislatures that there may be too many administrators ... [and] they're overpaid."

As the nationwide pool of principal candidates shrinks, school systems are faced with few options: They can recruit outside the district, recruit outside the profession, or "go young" - take a risk on 20-somethings who lack a decade or more of classroom experience.

Across the US, examples of willingness to take such a risk are multiplying. At Bloom Elementary School in Lithopolis, Ohio, Justin Knight has taken charge this fall, despite having only six years of teaching experience. He says his age (27) is a tricky issue, one his teachers are still coming to grips with. "A couple of teachers are retiring this year and the joke is, they've taught longer than I've been alive," Mr. Knight says.

He takes this into account in his managerial style. "At my age, if I came in here and ... made a lot of drastic changes, I'd probably lose my position."

While the hiring of young principals is a last resort in many places, in Compton, Calif., it is practically a strategy. The state took over the troubled district's 34 schools eight years ago. Since then, Randolph Ward, the state-appointed administrator, has hired a number of principals under 30, and currently oversees four in their 20s. They're nicknamed "the kid principals of Compton."

"Originally we were looking at [potential principals in their 20s] because of the shortage of qualified candidates at any age, but now we're looking for those kinds of prospects and even trying to grow our own," says Mr. Ward, who has made a point of promoting promising mid-20-somethings into assistant principalships.

"When you put people in principal positions who are smart and have a no-excuse, bull-headed attitude toward accomplishment, that tends to take away the risk factor associated with the younger age," says Ward, who himself became a principal at 32.

One of Ward's young hires is Stephen Schatz. Becoming a principal was the furthest thing from his mind in college. But he caught the bug when he joined Teach for America, a program that sends young teachers to needy schools. "I was so excited about teaching and being able to control the educational destiny of 20 kids," Mr. Schatz says. "The opportunity to do that with 500 or 1,000 kids - whatever the size of the school - the idea started to grow on me."

Indeed, at 28 he is in his third year as principal of Laurel Street Elementary School in Compton. Although the fresh-faced Schatz has yet to be mistaken for the crossing guard, nevertheless, he says, "About every day I have to say 'I'm the principal' to someone; it's not necessarily obvious."

"Sometimes the parents are surprised by how young I am, but it always comes back to: Are you going to provide the best education possible for my child?"

Part of the answer came last year with the results of the Stanford 9 achievement tests. The school's math scores jumped to the 59th percentile (in 1999, they were in the 39th percentile). According to Ward, it was the first time in more than a decade that any school in Compton had broken the 50th-percentile barrier.

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