The waiting game: graduates of new leaders for new schools sport enviable resumes and a zeal for education reform. But will school districts give them the key to the principal's office?

Education Next, Summer, 2004 by Alexander Russo

The New Leaders training, while intense, will not make them curriculum experts. They get enough training and experience to talk the talk and are expected to learn along the way. And so, despite the widely acknowledged need for better-trained principals, reports of shortages, and waves of retirees, New Leaders candidates can end up seeming green. "Everybody just wants experience," says one Chicago school administrator who has observed several of the principal searches where New Leaders fellows were interviewed. "The bottom line is that schools want someone to run the school, not just theories."

There are also cultural and stylistic conflicts that can complicate the relationship between nontraditional principals and career educators. Winning trust at a new school--what New Leaders tend to call "gaining entry"--is a key challenge, especially for those who have spent most of their careers outside of schools.

Danny Kramer, for example, had a few run-ins with other teachers during his residency year that a more experienced administrator might have avoided. "Danny started with us before the school year started and stayed with us the whole year," says Armstrong Elementary principal Arline Hersh. "He put his foot into it occasionally and learned that way," she says. "But that's part of the process, learning how to extricate yourself gracefully."

There are also those who, threatened and offended by the notion of programs like New Leaders, question the fundamental legitimacy of bringing in outsiders. "Why should we think someone would be an effective principal just because they were once a student?" asked Jill Levy, president of the 5,500-member Council of School Supervisors and Administrators in New York, last year. Her organization has vociferously opposed Chancellor Joel Klein's efforts to revamp principal training in New York City.

Conservative Hiring

New York is actually a bright spot in the New Leaders portfolio. Three quarters of the 2003 graduates of the New York program were selected to lead schools--a big increase from the previous year, when just two of eight became principals. Chicago has been more difficult to break into. In the program's first year, just one New Leaders graduate was tapped to run a school; two more have moved up to the top job since then. The share remains below 50 percent for the 2003 crop of New Leaders.

The disparity at least partly reflects the sheer size of the New York school district and thus the greater number of openings it has to fill. But the actual mechanisms for hiring principals in each city may provide a more likely explanation.

In New York it is largely up to district administrators to hire and assign principals. By contrast, in Chicago each individual local school council makes its own hiring decision. These councils, made up of parents, teachers, and community members, can be advised by the district. But the decision is, in the main, the council's to make.

Making the situation more difficult, roughly three out of four New Leaders in Chicago come from outside education--reflecting a priority expressed by the Chicago board of education, says Schnur.