The Attributes and Career Paths of Principals:

Implications for Improving Policy

Frank C. Papa Jr., Hamilton Lankford and James Wyckoff

University at Albany, SUNY

March 2002

We are grateful to the New York State Education Department and the RAND Corporation for support through their Wallace Fund grants on leadership. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the position of either NYSED or RAND. We appreciate comments on an earlier draft from Susan Gates, Cassie Guarino, Edith Hunsberger, Steve Jacobson, Kim Jinnett, James Kadamus, Ray Kesper, Susannna Loeb, Charles Mackey, Kevin McGuire, Jeanne Ringel, Tom Rogers and seminar participants at the Education Policy Workshop at the University at Albany. We also are indebted to Charles Mackey, Edith Hunsberger, Ron Danforth and Pat O’Brien all of the New York State Education Department for their assistance with use and interpretation of NYSED data files. Any errors are solely attributable to the authors.

Most observers believe that school leadership is crucial to realizing the high expectations for student achievement that have been put in place in most states and school districts over the last several years. There is a growing consensus regarding the attributes of effective school leaders. However, many of these attributes are difficult to clearly define and more difficult to objectively measure. Thus, despite a great deal of conventional wisdom and folklore about school leadership, little is actually known.

This paper examines the attributes and career paths of New York States principals. We believe a better understanding of the attributes and career paths of principals and how these have changed over time, are the foundation for additional analysis that will inform policies for the recruitment and retention of effective school leaders. We find that many of the commonly held beliefs about principals are supported by a systematic examination of the data. In many of these cases, going beyond a surface description reveals dynamics that are little understood but have important policy implications. In other cases, we find that some widely held beliefs about principals are more myth than fact. These, too, result in implications for policy. The following summarizes our major findings.

Commonly Held Beliefs	Findings from Our Analysis
Ø There is a shortage of principals that will grow over the next five years.	Ø In fact, up to 60 percent of current principals may retire over the next five years, and the problem is worse in urban, relative to suburban and rural, schools. Less discussed has been the fact that some portion of this “shortage” has resulted from the hiring practices of districts over the last 10 years. A fact not widely recognized Ø However, the number of individuals under the age of 45 and certified to be principals exceeds the number of principalships by more than 50 percent.
Ø Lower performing schools have less qualified leaders	Ø Although quality of leadership is difficult to assess, urban schools are much more likely to have less experienced principals and principals who received their bachelors degrees from lower ranked colleges. Ø Within New York City, schools where students performed poorly on standardized exams are much more likely to have less experienced principals and principals who received their bachelors degrees from lower ranked colleges. The same pattern is not so evident among other large urban schools.
Ø Paths to the principalship vary across several dimensions.	Ø The routes to becoming a principal do vary by type of school (e.g., elementary v. high school), urbanicity, and school enrollment size. Ø However, although difficult to assess, there is evidence in both urban and suburban districts that more qualified individuals have quicker paths to the principalship than do less qualified individuals.
Ø Compensation for urban principals is low.	Ø Until quite recently this was the case for New York City principals, who received substantially less than their suburban peers. New York City and other urban principals now typically receive somewhat higher salaries than do suburban principals. Ø Generally, novice principals receive only slightly higher salaries than do the experienced teachers in their schools. Ø It is not clear that these modest premiums compensate for the additional demands placed on many urban principals.
Ø Large numbers of urban principals are recruited to the suburbs for administrative positions.	Ø In fact, urban principals are much less likely to take administrative positions in other districts than are suburban principals. Ø In addition, urban principals are much more likely to take administrative positions within the same district or leave the New York state public school system than are suburban principals.

Finally, the analysis in this paper raises a number of questions for which our descriptive analysis cannot provide answers.

Ø What induces some individuals to become principals while others remain in teaching or leave the public school system altogether?

Ø Why does it seem that the least qualified principals end up at schools where students are performing worst?

Ø Where have the certified leaders who are no longer in the system gone? Private schools? Non-educational occupations?

Ø To what extent do absolute and relative salaries affect these decisions? How important are working conditions?

Ø Why aren’t more females in leadership positions?

Ø What can be done to attract and retain high quality individuals into the principalship, especially in low-performing schools?

Ø Are there hiring strategies that would work better than those used over the last decade?

We are currently pursuing research that will help address these questions from a couple of different perspectives. We are administering a survey to 1200 school principals that explores common practices used in the hiring of teachers, e.g., to what extent is the principal responsible for this decision. This will provide useful information about the ability and common practices employed by principals to shape the most important dimension of a school’s learning environment, its workforce. We are beginning a survey of all 4400 individuals who are certified to be principals but who are not currently serving in that position to explore there interest and qualifications to serve as principals. Finally, we are engaged in multivariate analyses of the factors that affect the initial match of principals to schools.

The Attributes and Career Paths of Principals: Implications for Improving Policy

1. Introduction

Policymakers are struggling to address the low academic achievement of many K-12 students and the gaps in achievement between urban, low-income and nonwhite students and their higher income, nonwhite and suburban peers. Concerns regarding low achievement and achievement gaps are not new. However, these issues have taken on more immediacy in an environment with heightened accountability, high stakes testing, and greater access to testing information. These heightened concerns arise at a time when there is substantial turnover of teachers, principals and superintendents. Further compounding the problem is the perception that school leadership has become more difficult. The principal is viewed not only as the building curricular expert but as the individual charged with leading and managing the internal operations of the school and the person who represents the school with a variety of external audiences regarding performance, resources and community relations.

The confluence of these changing demands of the principalship with the retirement demographics of the baby-boom generation gives rise to the perception that there is a shortage of qualified school leaders. One symptom of the so-called shortage is the impression that the best leaders are to be found in relatively well off schools and districts with high-performing students, while less qualified leaders are found in urban schools with disproportionate numbers of poor, nonwhite, and low-performing students. The reality is that little is known about the differences between high- and low-needs schools in their ability to attract and retain high quality leadership. Moreover there is little systematic information regarding the career paths, mobility and working conditions of school administrators.

This paper provides information on these issues, employing data from administrative records in New York State that allow us to follow all teachers and administrators in the state over the past 30 years. The breadth of the data (all teachers and administrators in all schools) allows analytical flexibility not possible with smaller datasets. The data is richer in its descriptions of school leaders than other administrative datasets used to date, and includes information on the undergraduate and graduate institutions that principals attended, their scores on teacher certification exams, the scores of students in their building on achievement tests, as well as a variety of other socio-demographic information on principals and the teachers and students in their buildings.

As is often the case with exploratory work, our analysis raises as many questions as it answers. For example, we find that:

· Although limited survey and anecdotal reports indicate that many districts report difficulty in finding principals, there are 50 percent more individuals under the age of 45 certified to be principals as there are positions. However, we have only limited information on whether these individuals have an interest in becoming, or would be suitable, principals.

· Principals are substantially sorted across schools such that the least qualified principals are most likely to lead schools where student performance is lowest. We know little about the factors that lead to this sorting.

· Over 85 percent of all principals have been teachers. Principals in urban districts are more likely than their suburban counterparts to have a non-teaching career path.

· Principals exhibit substantial mobility. In recent cohorts, about two-third of new principals leave the school in which they began their careers within six years. Most transfer within district, moving to schools similar to those they leave. We know little about what motivates this mobility.

· Principal salaries have faired poorly over the last decade, both in absolute and relative terms, but the impact of these changes is unclear.

This descriptive work does provide some insights to the behavior of principals, which should be useful in efforts to attract and retain highly qualified principals. Perhaps more importantly, it provides a basis from which to develop more sophisticated analyses of principal behavior. To better understand the descriptive analysis, the following section puts it in the context of previous research.