Education Week - February 26, 2020 - 11

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Investing in Principals Pays Off
Schools that got new principals in an initiative to improve
hiring, training, and mentoring of school leaders had
stronger reading and math performance than similar
schools in other districts in their state.
Percentile points

Reading
6.22
4.94

Math
2.61

2.87
SOURCE:
RAND Corporation

Year 2

Year 3+

longer than new principals in nonparticipating districts.
A separate analysis also found that
the pipeline districts spent less than
1 percent of their budgets, on average, on their revamped leadership
development work.

Identifying Strengths
Wallace sent invitations for the
next phase to districts with more
than 50,000 students.
Half of the districts in the pilot were
culled from a randomized sample of
districts with at least 20,000 students
but which have at least one highneeds school that requires comprehensive improvement and support.
Some districts have well-developed pipelines; others are just getting started.
"The whole point of the analysis of
the tool is to see, 'Does the tool work
well in all those situations, or how
might the tool need to be modified
if you're a district that already has
a lot in place versus a district that's
really just starting to think about?' "
Spiro said.
"That's the kind of information
that the tool developer is looking
for."
The districts, which the foundation did not name because it promised them confidentiality, include
both urban and suburban systems,
Spiro said.
Officials in the Orange County,
Fla., school district, told Education
Week they are one of the pilot districts. The district already had been
working diligently to develop its
ranks of future school leaders.
Susan Abbe, an executive area
director who leads the professional
learning department in the district,
said she accepted the invitation because she thought it was a great opportunity for her team to network
with peers across the country who
are focusing on leadership development and also for the team's own
professional learning.
"We think we can always be better.
That's just our mantra here, 'What
can we improve?' " Abbe said.
"We know there were areas that

Year 2

Year 3+

we could improve upon in our pipeline, and so we were really anxious
to work with other people who had
some research-based knowledge to
provide input to us or insights on
that."
So far, the district team has found
the project beneficial.
The self-assessment helped them
detect both strengths and weaknesses in their leadership pipeline,
and they've already come up with
ideas for short and longer-term projects to strengthen the pipeline.
They also got validation that they
were doing some of the right things.
The district already uses Florida's

We think we can
always be better.
That's just our
mantra here,
'what can
ZHLPSURYH"ŢŚť
SUSAN ABBE
Orange County school district,
Orlando, Fla.

Principal Leadership Standards to
guide its school leader training programs, professional development,
and hiring interviews for assistant
principals and principals, and they
got confirmation they were on the
right track with how they support
and evaluate school leaders.
"We [also] learned that we have
strengths in the way we differentiated and individualized support to
administrators, as well as mentoring
and coaching," said Patricia BowenPainter, a principal on assignment
who trains principals and assistant
principals.
"I think we suspected that we were
doing things well, but to have that
confirmed through this process has
been a strength for us."

In the short-term, the district is
making it easier for people to understand the different pathways for both
internal and external candidates to
become principals.
"We have lots of different processes and communications around
that that were all over the place;
so we have tightened that up and
created a flowchart for every possible avenue that somebody might
have coming into our district,"
Abbe said.
"Step by step, it gives you what do
you do first if you are this person;
these are the things you do, if you're
this person ... We've put that all
together into a document that will be
a lot more user-friendly and understandable for outside candidates."
Longer-term projects include creating a tracking system that will help
them better match principal candidates based on their backgrounds
and experience with school vacancies-that will require a software
upgrade-and increasing the rigor
of the interview process by adding
performance tasks to reflect realworld scenarios that principals will
likely face in schools but are difficult
to tease out through questioning.
Abbe said she's found the process
quite useful, particularly taking the
step-by-step look at what the district
already had in place and figuring out
how to make those processes better.
They were paired with a consultant from the Hillsborough County
school system, who was also very
frank about the challenges that systems faced in developing their pipelines and about pitfalls the Orange
County school systems could avoid.
The Wallace Foundation has a lot
more questions than answers at this
point.
"We have no idea at all what that
is going to turn out to be," Spiro said.
"It might be that that is very different in every place. It might be that
there are some needs that are in
common.
"We simply don't know, which is
another reason why we are doing
this test, and that's why the main
answer to all these questions is stay
tuned. Because we don't know."

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Education Week - February 26, 2020

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