[Editor's note: This is the fifth post in our latest blog series by John Chubb, "Building a Better Leader: Lessons from New Principal Leadership Development Programs." See here, here, here, and here for prior posts.]
It's one thing to practice skills in the controlled environment of a residency; it is quite another to practice when you are formally in charge of a school. Each of the alternative leadership programs examined in this blog series recognizes this truth and provides its graduates various kinds of support, sometimes as long as five years. Much as research has demonstrated about teaching—that teachers tend to become more effective over the first four or five years in the classroom—the same is likely true of school leaders: Their first few years in the position may be when the job is mastered (or not). These exemplar programs try to make those early years an additional learning experience.
This is hardly a new idea. Many school systems provide some sort of coaching or mentoring for new principals. But there are differences here. For one, the programs often gather systematic data on how graduates are performing. Support is not just a matter of a mentor’s opinion. Chicago’s Urban Education Leadership (UELP) tracks the Illinois School Report Cards of each graduate, which include value-added achievement scores for each. It also heeds the school culture surveys of the Chicago Consortium for School Research, data that represents the opinions of parents, students, and teachers.
New York’s Aspiring Principals Program (APP) routinely examines results from the annual NYC Survey—which supplies data on the learning environment—for each of the schools of its graduates. These surveys helped explain a first-year dip in academic performance in schools led by some of the program’s graduates. Indeed, major school interventions often result in temporary setbacks before new practices take hold. If a leadership development program does not prepare for the first year on the job and beyond, it is likely to leave many graduates floundering.
New Leaders got religious about assessment and evaluation following its RAND evaluation. It now collects data on its graduates for five years. Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) has the advantage of employing its graduates in schools operating the KIPP model. Graduates are thereby evaluated by their regional leadership on measures of the competencies in which they were trained.
Each program also offers a formal program of support for new leaders. KIPP provides ongoing local coaching and national leadership programs, such as the school leaders retreat. Building Excellent Schools (BES) provides continuing support as well. As Principal Shantelle Wright of Washington, D.C.’s Achievement Preparatory Academy confirmed, “They support us now, even into year five. One of the things that BES has is follow-on support; you can get the support as you need it—whether that is a phone call that you just talk some things through, whether you need someone to come to your school to help solve a problem, whether you need help with the governance of the board.” New Leaders now provides graduates with a Principal Institute that formalizes support for sitting principals.
It is the intentionality of these supports that impresses. Every school district has some kind of support structure for its school leaders, but these processes are not always notably effective. Most striking here is the quality of staff chosen to develop the new leaders. Support personnel—coaches, mentors, facilitators—are carefully selected for their success in providing the very same kind of leadership the programs are trying to cultivate. Mentors are not retired administrators or other readily available staff. They are battle-tested leaders themselves.
As UELP Executive Director Martinez passionately explained,
The coaching is absolutely critical: having coaches who have done this before, who know what it takes to do it, who understand the circumstances, who you are not going to be able to sweet-talk into believing this obstacle is not overcome-able in this very tough neighborhood; having those people in the school watching what they are doing, watching them observe a classroom teacher, watching them give feedback to a classroom teacher, watching them run a grade-level meeting, seeing the level of trust that they do or don’t produce in the people they are working with, watching how they relate to children, watching how they relate to parents in the school. That is what is critical. And those coaches are doing that kind of observation and feedback on a weekly basis for the first couple of years.
Jane Shirley of Get Smart Schools (GSS) relies for her coaches on a network of leaders in highly successful autonomous schools in Colorado and across the country. KIPP looks to its own proven leaders. APP uses the most successful of their program alumni, matching participants with leaders working in similar circumstances. New Leaders uses leaders steeped in its own Excellence Framework for coaching, recognizing, as Darren Reed explained, that “we don’t want to rely on someone’s individual understanding of school leadership.” (RAND has criticized New Leaders for inconsistency.)
Indeed, what is perhaps most notable about the ongoing relationship between program graduates and the programs is consistency. This comes from the direct efforts of the programs to provide very intentional and carefully considered support. It also comes quite powerfully from the communities of alumni and cohorts of participants who tend to be fiercely loyal to their programs and highly active in the ongoing work.
Principal Philonda Johnson of D.C.’s KIPP Discover explained it best:
I learned the importance of using your lifelines. The cohort that I was with during 2009 includes folks that I still connect with now. One runs an amazing school in Houston. Another runs an amazing school in Newark. They are still people I connect with and call and email.…The KIPP Foundation really encourages principals to leverage the strength of the network and other smart people across the country doing this hard, amazing work. We are taught to use a lifeline and be a lifeline.
Sally Sorte, a participant in the GSS program, put the residency at the top of her list of program virtues. But number two was revelatory. “Access to the alumni network was imperative,” she said. “I had access to Teach For America alums and people who were one year and two years ahead in the process... And they could really break it down into ‘here are your priorities, and you need to be focused on this.’ That was very helpful.”
It is often said that teaching is a solitary profession. Teachers close the doors to their classrooms and work alone all day with students. We now know that teaching at its best is not done in solitude. Teachers get good at what they do by working with other teachers and opening the doors to their classrooms; by observing and being observed. Great schools offer regular opportunities for teachers to work together, for veteran teachers to mentor new teachers, for teachers to consider data on their practice, and for teachers to develop their skills systematically over the formative years of their careers.
School leadership can be a solitary pursuit as well, the one role in a school without a cohort or immediate supervisor. Yet the collective wisdom of these exemplar programs is that isolation does not provide a reliable road to success. Each program supports its graduates for multiple years after they are sitting principals. Each collects data on the performance of schools run by graduates. Each offers ongoing coaching and technical assistance. Each embeds its graduates in a community of leaders, united in mission and connected by culture. Each recognizes that great leaders, like great teachers, require extended practice and feedback. The developmental process never really ends.
Stay tuned next week for lesson six—the capstone post in this series.
John Chubb is the president of the National Association of Independent Schools.