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

Despite these difficulties, New Leaders already seems to be making an impact, both directly and indirectly. Evidence from the 2002-03 school year, while minimal, suggests that schools with New Leaders fellows at the helm outperformed other schools with first-year principals in reading and math improvements and in reduced percentages of failing students.

At the same time, there has been an enormous increase in attention toward new ways of recruiting, training, and placing principals, at least some of which can fairly be attributed indirectly to New Leaders. New Leaders has 55 residents in training this year, has expanded to Washington, D.C., and will be expanding to Memphis, Tennessee, this summer. Moreover, the organization was recently named one of the top 20 organizations that are changing the world by Fast Company magazine. In the meantime, other efforts to set up fast-track principal training programs dot the nation, and in-depth residency components are increasingly common. The New York, Chicago, and Boston school systems have all initiated or adapted school leadership programs that have key elements in common with New Leaders.

Befriending the System

Nevertheless, New Leaders will need to find more success in placing its graduates if it is to remain a viable model for improving the management of regular public schools. This presents no small challenge. In the end, hiring a nontraditional principal may be considered more of a risk than hiring teachers or superintendents with nontraditional backgrounds--two related trends that have swept the nation over the past decade.

For starters, compared with the principal, a teacher has an important but relatively small role in the overall well-being of a school. Principals and administrators may be more willing to "take a chance" with a single 4th-grade class than risk the health of an entire school on a candidate with little experience in education. Furthermore, with the proliferation of alternative certification and programs like Teach for America, the practice of hiring teachers without formal degrees in education or classroom experience is fairly well established. Teaching, unlike the principalship, is also often an entry-level job that requires little previous experience aside from student teaching. The only real difference between a Teach for America teacher and a regular teacher is the nature of their training.

Similarly, the trend toward bringing in outsiders to run school districts is now at least a decade old. Superintendents with backgrounds in business, the military, or government are hired more for their forceful personalities and management skills than for their knowledge of instruction. They can arguably rely on the veteran educators within their systems to provide instructional leadership, while school principals need to be involved more directly in the process of upgrading the curriculum and monitoring the performance of teachers. By contrast, entering a role that involves directly managing professionals, like teachers, is tough to nearly impossible in any field where a candidate does not have significant experience. After all, how many newspaper editors did not do significant time in the reporting trenches? How many law firms' managing partners were not once first-year associates?