[Editor's note: This is the third post in our latest blog series by John Chubb, "Building a Better Leader: Lessons from New Principal Leadership Development Programs." See here and here for prior posts.]
Every leadership development program is guided by leadership standards, statements of what successful leaders should know and be able to do. This is true of the exemplars examined in this blog series and of open-enrollment programs run by countless colleges and universities. Thirty-two states comprise the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC) which developed a competency framework that is used in programs licensed in member states. It includes standards relative to school culture, management, community relations, and vision of learning.
In fact, most competency frameworks—whether guiding mundane licensure programs like many carrying the ISLLC imprimatur or other, more heralded alternatives—include similar expectations. School leaders should provide vision, set worthy goals, build effective teams, cultivate positive cultures, drive quality instruction, and get results. One would be hard pressed to distinguish successful from unsuccessful leadership development programs by looking only at competency frameworks.
KIPP’s framework has but four elements, consistent with the expert advice that less is more: student focus (what KIPP also calls “prove the possible”), drive results, build relationships, and manage people. Tellingly, the framework began with just the first two elements—in essence an almost maniacal focus on student achievement, which had been the founders’ secret to success. As KIPP sought to develop more school leaders, it recognized the crucial importance of working with the adults in the school and the school community.
The New York City Aspiring Principals Program (APP) and Chicago’s Urban Education Leadership Program (UELP) favor more explicitly detailed frameworks of twelve and ten points, respectively. New York singles out resilience and communication as formal expectations. Chicago flags relationships with parents. Both add technology as an area in which principals must lead. Building Excellent Schools (BES) lists six areas of emphasis, with specific attention to financial management, which is critical for their particular mission of launching new charter schools. Get Smart Schools identifies seven “domains” of competency, making unique mention of governance as essential to leading an autonomous school. New Leaders recently honed its “Urban Excellence Framework” down to six competencies, responding to evidence in a RAND analysis that the program might lack sufficient focus.
Focus is actually the name of the game, since one competency clearly takes precedence: Principals are not leaders unless they have followers. They accomplish little unless they have the support and cooperation of teachers and the larger community, including parents and school authorities. Nothing changes for students unless the work of teachers changes. Every modern competency framework for principals places emphasis on instructional leadership; principals must know and be able to drive high-quality instruction. Our exemplars agree. But knowledge of instruction does not get you far when you are no longer the instructor.
Every organization examined drew attention to this point in some fashion. APP director Kathy Nadurak explained, “This is very difficult for principals. They were teachers. As a teacher you never give up on a student. You just don’t. But when you’re a principal, you’re investing in the adults in the building on behalf of the children. And that’s what you always have to keep in mind—that you are not investing in the adults for the benefit of the adults. Supervision of teachers, then, is not about conducting X number of observations. It’s really about changing the practice of adults and then what happens if you’re unable to do that.” Principals must have the strength, compassion, and skill to choose students over staff if they are going to lead on the students’ behalf.
The senior director of KIPP’s Fisher Fellowship, Mikelle Willis, made a very similar observation: “Teachers and leaders have different primary stakeholders. As a teacher, your primary stakeholders are your students. As a leader, your primary stakeholders are ultimately the students, but what you really need to focus on is teachers. That’s a really huge shift that a lot of our fellows really need to understand and experience throughout the year.”
Gina Ikemoto joined New Leaders after working with RAND on its evaluation of the program. That research led New Leaders to sharpen the focus of its program on developing followership. As she related, “We were finding when people didn’t have [personnel management] skills, they would go into schools and they would lead, but people would not follow. And if they couldn’t get the buy-in of teachers, then they weren’t able to get traction and make gains. And in a lot of cases that would lead to their removal.” A vital skill indeed.
In fact, BES is starting schools from scratch, so there are no worries about leaders winning over the old guard in an existing school. But even when a leader is hiring the team, team-building is a high hurdle for educators. Chief Academic Officer Susan Walsh said bluntly, “What is most difficult to teach is really wanting to lead a team of people—and that team of people is not your students….Your team is no longer your class of twenty-seven students. Your team is the adults. And that can be very hard for people. And sometimes they think they want it, but they really don’t.”
For UELP Executive Director Peter Martinez, the whole job of successful leadership boils down to team-building. Principals must have high expectations and instructional know-how, but nothing comes of those skills without teams to do the work that makes them reality. Indeed, all of the academic and non-academic work of a school, including the daily crises and distractions, depends on the development of school-wide cooperation and division of labor. “If the principal understands how all of these things fit together and concentrates on building teams, grade-level teams, cycle teams, department teams…then what you’re doing is getting a group of people in the building to have a conversation about the entire school and not just their classroom. Over an extended period of time you build a team approach to both instructional and operational stuff.”
To be clear, every program values instructional leadership and a range of management skills, including school operations and finance. Schools that are going to change children’s lives must have excellent instruction, and they must run smoothly. But those elements are not the ones that most distinguish great leaders. Job one for any leader is winning over followers. Stay tuned later this week for lesson four…
John Chubb is the president of the National Association of Independent Schools.