Districts Matter: Cultivating the Principals Urban Schools Need

The Wallace Foundation

Executive Summary

The school district profoundly shapes the destinies of its principals: how they are trained, hired, mentored, evaluated and developed on the job. Yet until recently, many educators and policy- makers overlooked the unique role districts can play to help principals shoulder their central responsibil- ity: improving teaching and learning.

Armed with new evidence about the importance of school leadership and how it can best be devel- oped, a growing number of large districts are seeking to cultivate first-rate principals for all their schools. doing so requires that they carry out two big tasks.

first, build a large corps of well-qualified candidates for the principalship:

• ƒ  create job descriptions that clearly spell out what principals need to know and do to drive better instruction.

• ƒ  improve “pre-service” principal training.

• ƒ  establish selective hiring procedures that identify the most promising future leaders and match

  them to the right schools.

• ƒ  ensure that hard-to-staff schools get top-quality leaders.

  second, support school leaders on the job:

• ƒ  develop fair, reliable performance evaluations that hold principals accountable for student progress and inform their ongoing training.

• ƒ  offer mentoring to novice principals and professional development to all principals, so school leaders improve throughout their careers.

• ƒ  Provide school leaders with timely, useful data and training on how to use it.

• ƒ  enable principals to devote sufficient time to improving instruction and to making the best use

  of that time.

• ƒ  Plan for orderly turnover and leadership succession. 

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