Wallace Foundation funds 18-month study of principals |
On Board Online • September 26, 2016
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior Writer
In light of exploding and evolving demands on school principals, the State Education Department has launched a grant-funded initiative to recommend ways to improve their training and recruitment.
The Principal Preparation Project, an 18-month effort supported by a $1 million grant from the Wallace Foundation, includes plans to develop a prototype of a computer-based system that local school districts could use to recruit and hire principals who have appropriate preparation and experience.
The project also will look at ways to improve the state certification process.
"We certify many as school building leaders. The reality is few are ready to step into the job and be successful on day one," Ken Turner, director of the project, told the Regents at their September meeting.
A former deputy education commissioner, assistant school superintendent and principal in Colorado, Turner has been leading the project since April as an employee of the Regents Research Fund. He said he is putting together an advisory team that will include principals, teachers, superintendents and school board members, as well as deans of schools of education, parents and representatives of civil rights groups. The panel will make recommendations to the Regents as early as April 2017 and no later than next summer, he said.
One area of particular concern is whether school leaders are prepared to deal with students' social-emotional needs and issues, according to Deputy Commissioner John L. D'Agati.
Under terms of the grant, the project has five areas of focus. Those are:
- Requirements for certification as a school principal or "building leader."
- Requirements for programs that prepare principals.
- Professional development, supervision and evaluation of principals.
- Development of a "leader tracking tool" to help school district managers improve hiring.
- Adoption of a New York version of the latest national standards, which were produced in 2015 by the National Policy Board for Educational Administration. (New York uses a 2008 version.)
Step one will be assessing the status quo, Turner said. '" he said. "We do have data on exam-takers here. We have numbers of enrollees in programs. We have very weak measures, and not a lot."
Turner said one goal of the project is to try to determine what sorts of information would help state education leaders determine whether principal training programs and requirements are moving in the right direction.
"Do we want to look at outcomes for schools led by these individuals? Yes or no. Do we want to look at evaluations by people who supervise them? Yes or no," he said. "I don't have the answers to this. We just need to put it on the table and say, 'should we commit to collecting this kind of data'?
"We're at the beginning of the project," Commissioner MaryEllen Elia told the Regents. "I agree we don't want to move too fast," she added later, "but we also want to make sure that, as we get down the road, we have in place the guidelines that our prep programs need to use in order to prepare our principals, so they're able to do what you know - and I know - is important."