WASHINGTON — It is not money that is the key to transforming America’s troubled schools. The key is school leadership — principals and superintendents.
Before you dismiss this analysis as something you already knew, let me tell you where it came from: a survey of principals and superintendents, many of whom are running troubled schools and school districts.
So are these educators saying it’s their fault that their schools aren’t working very well? Not quite. They know what to do, they insist, and they’re chomping at the bit to get it done. But politics and bureaucracy get in the way.
The survey, the latest in a series undertaken by Public Agenda, a New York-based research organization, found school leaders virtually bubbling with confidence that they know how to improve public education — if only they were left alone to do it.
And what stands in their way? Interference from parents and "downtown," in the case of principals, and from politicians, in the case of superintendents. Non-academic requirements eat up their time, and unfunded mandates eat up their budgets. They can’t reward excellent teachers or dump ineffectual ones. They’re saddled with demands to raise test scores but left without the autonomy they need to make it happen.
The job, according to one of the 853 randomly selected principals and 909 superintendents who took part in the survey, is close to overwhelming. "My desk is never clear of obligations. … Constant interruptions from parents, teachers. … Principals do not have a lunch hour."
"In many ways, superintendents and principals seem to be chafing at the bit," said Deborah Wadsworth, Public Agenda president. "They are convinced that strong leadership can transform schools — and they are especially eager for more power to reward good teachers and remove poor ones — but politics and bureaucracy just eat away at them."
I don’t doubt it. It’s hard to win when you can’t reward your best players or bench (or trade) those who either can’t or won’t perform. It’s hard to focus on your key task when those above you are saddling you with duties that have more to do with satisfying bureaucratic imperatives than on doing your job. One earmark of successful principals is their ability to manipulate or ignore "downtown" — either because they are clever or because they have "godfathers," inside or outside the system, who can cut them some slack. Indeed, the relative freedom from bureaucratic interference is one of the main reasons for the growth of the charter school movement.
But there’s another side to that coin. Autonomy can empower bad principals as well as good. It can free up the autocrats to run roughshod over staff or to take care of friends or to punish those they view as threats. Only a third of the superintendents in the Public Agenda survey said they are happy with the competency of their principals when it comes to recruiting talented staff, making tough decisions, delegating responsibility or using money effectively.
I don’t know if these judgments are fair or not, but I’ve learned to be a bit skeptical of cops who would be solving crimes left and right were it not for the idiots in the white shirts, of reporters who’d be winning Pulitzers but for the cretins at the editors’ desks, and of principals who would be turning out National Merit Scholars by the score if they could get free of "downtown." Giving autononomy to incompetents could be like using Miracle-Gro on kudzu.
One of my problems with this new survey is that it tells me nothing about what these school leaders would actually do if they were given a free hand. This may be more the fault of the surveyors than of the respondents, but to my mind it is essential. I can’t tell you the number of principals and superintendents I talk to who seem to have no idea of how to improve learning (or test scores) in their schools, beyond the cliches of bigger budgets and smaller class sizes. Many seem not to have thought seriously about the issue — perhaps because so many principals and superintendents are hired to fix systems (by improving discipline, straightening out payroll or any of a hundred other things) than to educate children.
Still the respondents have a point: Responsibility without resources and authority is a recipe for failure. Which might make you wonder why nearly three-quarters of the superintendents and two-thirds of the principals said they’d choose the same line of work if they were just starting out.
Sorta reminds you of Samuel Johnson’s characterization of second marriages as "the triumph of hope over experience."
William Raspberry can be reached at The Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, DC 20071-9200 or willrasp@washpost.com.
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