Neatly stacked file folders and stapled memos are beginning to lap over
the edges of Nancy Hottman's principal-sized desk, threatening to cascade
onto the carpeted floor three-and-a-half feet below. From her high-back
chair, Newburg Middle School's veteran chief executive can look through
the large window on the opposite side of the room and see a decade-old dream
coming true. The new Newburg is rising from its foundation a few hundred
yards to the west.
"It's going to be wonderful," she says. "The new building
represents a lot of promises and a lot of waiting, but it's going to be
wonderful."
Still, Hottman's joy is not unbridled. A new school means new managerial
challenges for any principal, and Hottman is already struggling with some
of them. The old building has two custodians, but the new school has more
floor space. The school council has $40,000 to spend. Should the money be
invested in another janitor, or should Hottman follow her instruction-oriented
instincts and recommend Newburg invest in a pair of classroom assistants
instead?
The issue takes on added urgency at Newburg because -- much to the proud
13-year principal's dismay -- her school fell into the KERA "decline"
category last fall, and the pressure to raise student achievement is palpable
in the building. And it's just one of dozens of management issues Hottman
and other middle school principals in Jefferson County find themselves grappling
with every day -- while back at the district office, system leaders are
declaring that principals must upgrade their own skills and become "captains"
of reform.
""We don't have a choice but to ask a lot of our middle school
principals right now," says Sandy Ledford, middle school advocate and
a member of the Superintendent's cabinet. " A principal, in order to
be a instructional leader in this reform effort, has to develop or expand
a specific set of skills."
The district has made a commitment to raise student achievement significantly
by the end of the 2000-2001 school year, relying on academic standards,
better classroom assessment, and an on-going, more sharply focused program
of teacher professional development. While much will depend on teachers'
willingness to do the hard work of change, Ledford and principals themselves
acknowledge that every building will need a leader who thoroughly understands
why a standards-based school is different from what exists now -- and knows
how to get there.
Nancy Hottman has the advantage of some principals who have been reluctant,
due to a lack of training or inclination, to venture much outside the principal's
managerial role. "I've always believed that instructional leadership
comes first," she says. After a career as a social studies teacher,
Hottman worked in JCPS as a social studies coordinator and later as a roving
instructional specialist
In 1983, Hottman became principal at Newburg. The 1990 advent of KERA and
the KIRIS assessment, which has a knack for ferreting out weak instructional
practices, simply underscored Hottman's commitment to instructional leadership.
Even so, as she and other middle school principals in Jefferson County testify,
belief sometimes takes a backseat to reality.
"I have to manage this building, and that takes an incredible amount
of time," she says. "If you don't deal with the daily nuts-and-bolts
issues of the school, you will not have the environment you need for a sound
instructional program.
"I may have a clear instructional agenda when I walk into this school
on any given day, but if events occur that have to be dealt with right now,
then my original agenda is added to the next day's agenda. You are a continuous
juggler as a principal, juggling your management and instructional duties.
You always feel guilty."
Most principals come from a different era
Like Hottman, Johnson Traditional Middle School principal Linda Miller left
the classroom many years ago and did her time as a district specialist before
moving into school building administration. She learned the "clinical
supervision" techniques of the time, which focused on teacher evaluation
and basic classroom strategies. The standards-based reforms called for today,
she says, require a whole different set of principal skills -- skills she
and many of her middle-aged colleagues never acquired in the classroom.
She agrees with Mary Hardin, principal at Thomas Jefferson Middle School,
who says principals "need to know as much or more than teachers in
the classroom. It's almost like principals who have been in the job a long
time need to go back to the drawing board." Hardin says her graduate
classes in administration looked at instructional leadership "but it
was not as detailed or structured as it needed to be to be effective in
the KERA environment."
"We are all struggling because most of us were teachers years and years
ago," Miller says. "There's so much more we must be able to do
today to reach all of our kids."
Miller is probably ahead of the curve. This year she has pulled together
groups of Johnson teachers to carefully examine the work students are producing
on different teams and in different subjects, always asking the question:
what does quality work look like?
"If we reach a consensus on what quality is, we can begin to work backwards
and determine what each of us as professionals is going to have to do to
make sure that we get that result from our students," Miller explains.
"If we get to that, KIRIS will just be an audit of what we are already
doing."
Ultimately, Miller hopes Johnson will be able to establish exit criteria
for each grade "where a child must be able to perform at a given level
in order to advance." But she knows that kind of accountability will
require teachers -- and the principal -- to have a complete grasp of cutting-edge
teaching methods.
"Principals need a lot of professional development to do what we are
now saying we want to do," Miller says. "We need the same information
our teachers are getting, so we can truly be partners in solving some of
the curriculum and instruction problems.
"I've never taught in a KERA classroom; my teaching experience was
long ago. I need to know enough to be an active participant -- to go into
their classrooms and be an evaluator, a coach, and a sharer of ideas. I
need to be able to help them grow."
Miller says she and other principals also need "the assistance of colleagues"
to sit down and think through what it means to move a whiole building toward
reform. "I need other principals' input to verify I'm on the right
track. How are you going to pull your teachers together? How do you manage
time, which is unbelievably limited? What kind of process can I use to make
sure we're asking the right kinds of questions?"
Miller and her colleagues -- most of whom, she says, "are coming along,
although a few may be kicking" -- have dozens of questions like this.
She believes they're beginning to get some answers, as a result of the district's
new emphasis on principal professional development.
A new program of principal development emerging
A few months ago, in the wake of the bad news from KIRIS, the district's
middle school principals agreed with Sandy Ledford that their monthly meetings
needed "to stop focusing on administrative issues and start focusing
on instruction and other issues related to the leadership of reform."
Since then, principals have spent time learning about the intricacies of
writing portfolios, the use of standards and open-response questions to
assess student learning, the connection between reading and writing instruction,
and more. These monthly sessions will continue, and will be augmented this
summer by several professional development seminars for principals, co-sponsored
by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.
"All of these sessions are offered from a principal's perspective,"
Ledford says. "When you go into a classroom, what should you be looking
for, and how can you help make it happen?" The NASSP training, underwritten
in part by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, will last 16 months and
will include hands-on assignments, shadowing by a national expert in principal
leadership, and cross-visits with middle school principals of the Corpus
Christi, Texas school system, who are also pursuing standards-based reform.
What a "new, improved" principal might look like
If all this professional development goes as planned, what will JCPS's "new,
improved" middle school principals look like? They could look more
like Mike Suttles, who was selected just last month as Westport Middle School's
permanent principal, after a year as an interim.
It might seem odd to hold up Suttles -- a first-year principal who admits
he's still learning the basics of his job -- as a model for what JCPS middle
school principals need to become. And he's certainly not advertising himself
that way. But Suttles' relative youth, his recent experience as an outstanding
social studies teacher and consultant, and his year of service as one of
Kentucky's "Distinguished Educators" (helping out schools in decline)
put him ahead of the game -- at least in the area of instructional leadership.
As a "D.E.," Suttles says he learned that "if you're going
to be a leader and you want people to follow you, you have to honest, you
have to be upfront with them, you have to be willing to work as hard or
harder than they do, and you have to take an interest in what they're working
on. And most of all, you have to have a vision of what a world-class school
looks like, and how to get there."
Although Suttles spent long hours this year struggling to learn the management
duties of the principalship, he also found ways to lead his staff in a vision-setting
process that culminated in an agreement "to get every student to grade
level." His staff will use reading and writing skills as the springboards
to reach that goal. In his quest to become world-class, Suttles convinced
the National Alliance for Restructuring, a respected, standards-oriented
reform group, to accept Westport as a member.
Suttles is blunt about the distance his school has to go. "We do a
lot of things here," he says, "but I'm not sure we do them very
well. We have a lot of work to do on curriculum. In preparing for KIRIS
this year, we took a look at what was going to be assessed in 7th and 8th
grades, then asked teachers in each subject to sit down and develop a list
of subjects and topics that they already had taught and find out what the
gaps were. And there were gaps as long as your arm in some areas."
Suttles believes Westport's NAR membership and a tightly defined school
transformation plan can help keep the staff focused on "the number
one issue -- the quality of the work our students do." The school will
use a three-day retreat this summer to move the process forward, emphasizing
standards, assessment, and curriculum development. If enough teachers "get
excited," Suttles says, "it may be enough to create a groundswell
of change in our school."
Still, Suttles admits that the managerial responsibilities of principals
make his current work "the hardest thing I've ever done, by far."
As a Distinguished Educator, he had time to explore new ideas about teaching
and learning with teachers. But "managing the building, being an instructional
leader, being a liaison with parents doesn't afford me the time to sit down
and have those deep conversations."
"This is the real world here," he says. "I have this vision
and I'll continue to strive to reach it, but the actual process of getting
people to buy into it is very hard."
It's really all about time, Suttles concludes, echoing the comments of Nancy
Hottman, Linda Miller, and Mary Hardin. And one has to wonder -- even with
all of the additional training and the collegial conferences proposed by
district leaders -- whether JCPS's principals can hope to become "captains
of reform" without some attention to the current administrative structure
of schools.
They may simply need more help -- another assistant principal, or an instructional
specialist who is not called away to fill out forms and deal with discipline
-- a 'first mate' who can keep the ship afloat while the captain leads,
inspires, and coaches the crew, always keeping one eye on the stars.
##
The work of urban school principals is "more
ambitious and ambiguous" than ever, says a consultant to the Edna McConnell
Clark Foundation.