(Vol. 1, No. 1 - Winter 1996/1997)

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Surviving the Avalanche

To thrive in the world according to KERA, principals must be
more than managers -- they must become leaders of reform



by Barnett Berry and John Norton

The rich aroma of spicy tomato sauce wafts through the halls of Highland Middle School late one fall afternoon, hours after the last student has scraped his tray in the school cafeteria. Back in the kitchen, looming over a huge stainless steel cauldron like one of MacBeth's witches, Principal Robert Knight is personally preparing the bubbling main dish for Highland's annual spaghetti supper and silent auction.

"It's just one of those 15-hour days in the life of a principal," Knight says cheerfully. "They come fairly often."

Most weekday mornings, Knight is busy in his office before students and faculty arrive at school -- "it's the only time he can think about any one thing for very long," the school secretary says. On days when school activities stretch into the evening, Knight, like many principals, is frequently the last person out the door at nine or 10 in the evening.

One might assume -- with all this time on the job -- that Knight and his fellow middle school principals can find the necessary hours in each day to do the most important work of any school, making sure that teachers are teaching and students are learning at high levels.

But, as Knight and several of his colleagues readily admit, the managerial demands of the modern public school often seem to gobble up all the time available -- and leave the building's chief administrator hungry for even more.

It's a big problem. Just how big is underscored by the JCPS middle schools' recent showing on the KIRIS eighth grade testing. If the district's middle schools are going to reverse their academic decline, principals will have to lead the charge. But the core question seems to be: do they have the time, and the support and preparation, to provide that leadership?

"The way we have prepared principals has been out of sync with what we need," says Deborah Walker, director of the district's Gheens Academy for professional development. "We prepare them to manage schools, not to focus on and improve teaching and learning."

In the wake of the 1996 KIRIS results, the issue of principal preparation may finally be rising toward the top of the district's priority list. Addressing the issue effectively will require a sharpness of focus the district has not been able to demonstrate up to now.

Job One: Discipline and order

By dodging some of the "administrative conditioning" that takes place along the typical road from teacher to principal, Robert Knight believes he's been able to avoid what many principals find themselves pushed to become -- full-time managers of school facilities and student behavior.

Knight, who has a doctorate in curriculum and instruction, worked closely as a teacher with the National Writing Project, a widely respected program that helps teachers discover how to move students from passive to active learners. Knight says that experience, and a personal passion for new ideas, has helped him remain "a curriculum man, not a school man" -- all of which may help explain why Highland is one of only two middle schools in the KERA "success" category.

Even so, Knight says he struggles daily to give teaching the attention it deserves. "My number one job here is to maintain a safe physical environment and manage student behavior and needs," Knight says. "We have so many students who need so much. I spend 80% of my time on safety and discipline."

So do many of his colleagues. Jan Calvert, principal at Williams Middle School, admits that "there are days when I don't get into classrooms or even hallways. We have so many climate issues here.
"When I do get into classrooms," Calvert adds, "I get a good sense of where we need to work and where we need to focus. But how do you find time to do it all?"

Problems of preparation -- and false pride

The formal training of most principals simply hasn't prepared them for the leadership demands of a state assessment system committed to high standards. "Our graduate courses just did not teach us a thing about being a building leader," says Bob Strong, principal at inner-city Western Middle School. "We have to learn by experience -- with very little help from anyone."

University coursework in law, finance, and school facilities provide little guidance for principals who now find themselves struggling to figure out how to transact daily school business and work with teachers to transform what goes on in the classrooms.

In recent years, the district has supported several principal preparation efforts that are more realistic than the administrator degree programs usually offered through universities. For example, Strong and several of his colleagues give high marks to a program provided through the district and the University of Louisville called "Principals for Tomorrow." The program takes a more hands-on approach to training future principals. But its primary focus is still on management -- not instructional leadership. And it offers little help for principals already on the job who, as one principal has put it, "need to rebuild the car engine going 70 miles an hour down the freeway."

So where does the school system find the kind of principal leadership development necessary to thrive in the world according to KERA? Ironically, such help has been available for the asking for several years -- but until recently, JCPS just hasn't asked.

The Kentucky state education department offers a principal leadership program geared to the high-performance demands of KERA -- a program one JCPS central office administrator admits is "a tremendous resource."

"We should have been working more closely with the state over the past several years to take more advantage of what they had to offer in the way of help," he says. "We made a mistake. We were too sure of ourselves. We didn't think we needed help."

To their credit, some district leaders are now admitting the mistake, and the district is beginning to call on the state's resources in response to the KIRIS emergency. "We're doing a lot of catching up on things we could have already been doing and kids could have been benefiting from," the administrator says.

Learning to control the avalanche

The middle school principalship in Louisville has been a hectic, lonely job, with little time to reflect or learn from others who have "been there." When principals have gotten together, it has usually been away from their schools -- often in district-called meetings that might address important teaching and learning issues, but more often focus on questions of school management.

Principals rarely, if ever, critique and learn from each other in the school setting. About the only time a principal is shadowed by a mentor or coach is when a school reaches the KERA "decline" or "crisis" status. One principal hungry for help admits that while "the thought of having a distinguished educator in your school would be painful, it could turn out to be a wonderful learning experience."

"We are big bureaucracy," says a JCPS central office administrator. "The central office is pulled constantly in so many different directions, it is very difficult to focus on the real learning needs of principals in the schools. And we waste a lot of their time with things that aren't important."
Is the district ready for some soul-searching on the issue of principal leadership development?

Lenny Hay, a former principal who now works in the Gheens Academy, thinks so. "What we need is vision, and concrete images of how to actually do it, and some serious thinking that cuts across bureaucratic lines," she says.

Hay and Gheens director Walker believe they have a charge from Superintendent Stephen Daeschner to help redesign principal preparation. They're working with a representative group of principals and teachers on a plan.

Any successful plan is likely to be expensive and time-consuming. Ultimately, it will need to pull together the now-scattered pieces of principal development -- initial preparation, selection, professional development, and reward -- into a whole that produces a principal resilient and resourceful enough to prosper in today's schools.

"You know what school is like for a principal?" asked one Louisville middle school principal. "I'll tell you. Every day is a snowball rolling down a mountainside, turning into an avalanche with no time to figure out where you are, much less how to get out of the way."
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To learn about a school that has found the time to reform, read Barnett Berry's "Ideas" column on page 14.