Influential texts have long identified principals as being essential to school success. Accordingly, high expectations and pressures have attended the principalship and affected the professionals who occupy it. This exploration asked three interrelated questions: What pressures have urban school principals typically faced, in the past and today? What new pressures have emerged? What effects have these pressures had on principals and the prospect for lasting urban school improvement? To answer these questions, historical and contemporary artifacts were analyzed, as well as data from interviews with 17 principals from one large urban district. Findings indicate that today, even more so than in the past, the urban principalship is characterized by extensive responsibilities and limited control, nested in a context of relentless accountability.
This study investigates how principals in a large US urban school district responded to two different superintendents who employed contrasting leadership styles and utilised divergent organisational schemes. We originally conducted interviews with principals in 2007, when the district's superintendent asserted fierce performance demands and limited principals' site-based discretion in favour of protecting and exerting central office power. We conducted interviews again in 2013 after a new superintendent had relaxed school test score expectations and distributed the central office's previously tight, centralised control into largely self-directing sub-regions. Our findings demonstrate that superintendent change noticeably affected how principals understood and encountered accountability, autonomy and stress. To help make sense of our findings, we employ a three-part conceptual framework drawn from the study of educational leadership. We conclude by considering implications, including the notion that unrelenting stress has become a permanent part of the modern urban US principalship.This study situates at the nexus of district and building leadership in order to provide particular attention to the lived experiences of school-based leaders. In doing so, we build on previous research that has examined the work lives and attitudes of principals (Leithwood et al. 2004;Mintrop 2012;Shipps 2012;Spillane and Hunt 2010). Specifically, we investigate how principals responded to two different superintendents (chief school system leaders) in a large urban school district in the Southeastern United States. In 2007, the superintendent, Dr Morgan (a pseudonym), exhibited an aggressive, top-down management style in which he demanded immediate results and exerted constant accountability performance pressure regarding school aggregate test scores. In 2008, a new superintendent, Mr Davis (a pseudonym), took over the district. By 2013, he had established greater system-wide autonomy and deemphasised using aggregate school test scores as the predominant determinant of principal performance. Symbolic of the differences between the two superintendents' approaches to principals, Dr Morgan was well known for either demoting principals or transferring them to a different school two or three years after they took their positions. Under Mr Davis, conversely, ensuring principal stability became a stated systemic goal, and the district introduced a modest financial incentive plan intended to reward principals who stayed at their schools for at least five years.
Instructional leadership has long been advocated as a primary responsibility of principals. What is unclear, however, is the role that instructional leadership plays in the current high-stakes testing era in the daily work lives of principals, how they practice as instructional leaders, and toward what instructional outcomes they strive. This study focused on how principals understand the relationship between their daily work and the improvement of instruction in their schools. The study incorporates the voices of 20 principals. Multiple conceptions of instructional leadership are identified and problematic aspects of these conceptions are discussed.
Background: Two decades of elementary and secondary education reform (P-12) presumably affects programs and policies in higher education (P-16). Purpose: This article offers an essay review of the book, From High School to College. The book includes a report on a Stanford University project that investigated the policy articulation between P-12 and higher education. Research Design: The book reports case studies on six states with an additional chapter commenting on the status and future of community (2-year) colleges. Findings: Findings suggest that the case studies depend heavily on perceptual data from stakeholders. In addition, the editors and contributing authors do not address differences in the two sectors’ missions. Specifically, the P-12 system includes both open admissions and compulsory attendance requirements, whereas institutions of higher education (IHE), from 2-year to research institutions, wrestle with the tension between open and elite admissions and comparative rankings among the IHEs.
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