Examining the Assistant Principalship: New Puzzles and Perennial Challenges for the 21st Century

reviewed by Izhar Oplatka — February 16, 2012

Title: Examining the Assistant Principalship: New Puzzles and Perennial Challenges for the 21st Century
Author(s): Alan R. Shoho, Bruce G. Barnett, & Autumn K. Tooms (eds.)
Publisher: Information Age Publishing, Charlotte
ISBN: 1617356174, Pages: 198, Year: 2011
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Since the foundation of educational administration as a field of study, its scholars and researchers have focused mainly on the principalship and superintendency, while the role of other educational leaders was left relatively untouched. Therefore, Shoho et al.’s book is a welcome contribution to our understanding of educational leadership in different levels of the school's administration. It provides the readers with new knowledge about the preparation of assistant principals, the characteristics of their role, their leadership perspectives and their career experiences in different countries on the globe (e.g., the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong).

The edited book is organized around nine chapters including the introduction written by the book editors. In the first ten pages the editors depict their book's rationale and foci and set the stage for the various chapters that compose the book. Accordingly, the book focuses on the challenges facing assistant principals nowadays and revolves around issues of how assistant principals share and divide their energy, ideas, and time within the school day and how they are prepared to become instructional leaders. The answer to these and related ponderings is gained through a collection of empirical efforts that center on assistant principals and their experiences in different international contexts.

Chapter Two, written by Susan Read, analyzes the factors that influence the preparedness of teachers for the assistant principal role and indicates that the most influential preparatory activities were service as curriculum leader, teaching, and completion of PQP. Following a description of the current literature about leadership succession, leadership preparation, and assistant principalship, the author presents her curiosity: how do teachers construct their knowledge of the role of vice-principal prior to assuming the role and within the first few years afterwards? For Read, professional socialization for assistant-principals commences when teachers engage in extracurricular activities because they are opportunities to enrich the lives of students beyond the government-mandated curriculum. To feed her curiosity, the author gathered data from novice assistant principals in secondary schools from the Toronto District School Board through a questionnaire listing activities in which they might have engaged. The analysis of their responses leads the author to mull over next steps in the study on assistant principals and their succession.

Steven Busch, Angus MacNeil and Sarah Baraniuk used a cognitive interview protocol in which they asked American practicing assistant principals to endow a newly appointed assistant principal with one single piece of advice. Based on survey data gleaned from 361 assistant principals from a variety of different school districts across the greater Houston area, the authors categorized the advice as knowledge (e.g., preparation, difficult job, decisions, students, people), skills (e.g., relationships, listening, flexible, communication, high expectations), or attributes (e.g., virtue and trust, positive, not personal, patient). The advice from the practicing assistant principals was found to be compatible with the model of transformational leadership and the authors end their paper with some implications for leadership preparation programs.

The fourth chapter brings up the stories of assistant principals in Hong Kong. Paula Kwan and Allan Walker report on a large-scale study of assistant principals that aimed to outline assistant principals’ general responsibilities in secondary schools, examining the gap between ideal responsibilities pertaining to their role and the actual assistant principals' performance and their job satisfaction. Their study, which included 331 assistant principals, reflects the change in the role of assistant principals in the wake of school-based management and decentralization reforms. It was found that the roles of the assistant principal span managerial and strategic functions in schools in addition to traditional-pastoral responsibilities due to increased delegation of tasks by school principals. In other words, the assistant principal has to move from instructional-focused functions to administrative tasks. The authors conclude that the reforms have led to a proliferation in the responsibilities of assistant principals and, therefore, they should be helped to cope with their changing role.

An international comparative study, examining the career and role of assistant principals in the US, UK, and China, is presented in the next chapter. Teri Melton, Barbara Mallory, Russell Mays and Lucindia Chance divided their paper, broadly speaking, into two major parts. The first part displays international historical perspectives on the roles and preparation of assistant principals in the three countries, while the second part presents the findings of an exploratory study that sought to examine the roles, the challenges, and the preparation of assistant principals in each country. The only consistent theme the authors revealed was inconsistency, i.e., a variety of roles, tasks, challenges and forms of trainings within and across the three countries.

Thus, the job descriptions of assistant principals were defined differently across the three countries, with the only common features across all three being a lack of unified standards for their preparation. Therefore, the authors recommend focusing on instructional leadership in the preparation of assistant principals and minimizing the teaching duties, especially in the UK and China. Here again, the manifold nature of educational administration across different nations is illuminated.

In chapter six, Heather Rintoul analyzes the storied experiences of 14 Canadian assistant principals in order to investigate how they construe and manage decisional dilemmas in the context of their schools and school communities. Results of this study demonstrated that assistant principals seek solutions that they frame as ethical via the insights garnered from their principals and governing board superintendents. Additionally, it is likely that some of the more intriguing aspects of this study, as the author felt, "were the simmering interpersonal issues between genders…harassment of males by females has been noted much less, perhaps because males may feel uncomfortable speaking of these issues, viewing the reporting/speaking of such behaviors as unmanly" (p. 122).

The moral aspects of leadership are also debated in the next chapter, especially in respect to social justice. Exploring how American assistant principals understood their roles in schools, Christa Boske and Lillian Beneavente-McEnery found that these assistant principals shared ways in which they strived to improve the lived experiences of children and families, especially for those who lived on the margins. The authors proposed a conceptual framework for assistant principals as catalysts of social justice according to which the process begins when assistant principals increase their critical consciousness of self and others. Later on, they recognize themselves as pivotal players in promoting student learning and facilitating school wide change in order to address concerns facing under-served populations. In some sense, this group of principals should be admired for their sustainable courage and commitment to promote social justice in their schools, although administrators or other teachers consider some of their efforts questionable, even dangerous. This commendable chapter is replete with many lively and exciting examples of their social commitment.

The last chapter, written by Anna Sun, centers on the perceptions of current-day assistant principals in New York regarding their actual and desired roles and responsibilities. In addition, the author compared these respondents' views with those of assistant principals reported by Glanz in 1994, thereby providing an historical overview of the influence of accountability and standardization reforms on the assistant principalship. Interestingly, current-day assistant principals indicated devoting more time now to instructional leadership, student counseling, teacher selection, and curriculum development than their counterparts used to in the early 1990s. The chapter ends with some suggestions for further research to determine how increased accountability and high-stakes testing are affecting the roles and duties of assistant principals.

The book chapters are well organized and structured, enabling the readers to benefit from a host of ideas, insights and empirical data. The book is highly recommended for policy-makers, principals, teachers, and above all, assistant principals who want to better realize the complexity, preparation, practice, and varied nature of the assistant principalship. One of the strengths of this book is the geographical variety of its chapters, which yields data drawn from myriad sources and different educational contexts across the globe. Additionally, the combination of both faculty and practitioners in the authorship of the book chapters is praiseworthy, as it contributes very much to the scholarship of the assistant principalship.  

No text is perfect, however. In some points I felt that the authors could have compared their data to the international literature about assistant principalship, which in turn, could result in some cross-national fertilization. Most of the authors seem to have grounded their theoretical framework mainly within the research conducted in their own country. This led some authors to claim that "only recently has the literature attempted to characterize the distinctive nature of the vice-principal's role…" (p.13), ignoring the many papers that had been published about the assistant principalship in international journals since the 1970s. In doing so, the benefit of inter-national fertilization of knowledge is overlooked in some sense.