Opinion

HOW GOOD PRINCIPALS MAKE A DIFFERENCE

THE last four years have seen a quiet revolution in New York City’s public schools, and early evidence suggests that it’s bringing major gains for students.

In large part, this revolution has focused on the city’s nearly 1,500 principals. By general agreement, they’re the system’s most important executives – yet they long had little real executive power, controlling an average of just 6 percent of their schools’ budgets.

Imagine a company whose CEO, supposedly with primary responsibility for the firm’s performance, has almost no role in deciding on how its money will be spent. That’s how principals functioned in this city’s schools – and, in fact, how they still function in the overwhelming majority of US school districts.

But today, thanks to reforms instituted by Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, each principal controls about 85 percent of his or her budget, giving all of them the opportunity to exercise leadership in ways principals couldn’t before.

What does this mean for New York schoolchildren? It’s just four years since the city embarked on this initiative (29 schools in 2004, expanded to 48 in 2005 and 332 in 2006, and finally all schools last year), so we have only preliminary data on the reform’s effect on student achievement. But the research of our team from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management suggests the effect is substantial.

Last month, I reported to the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association on our findings in New York and seven other cities that are achieving gains by empowering principals.

The gains for students were especially striking in New York, where a difference of a mere 10 percentage points in principals’ budget control translated (other factors being equal) to 11 percent more students scoring proficient or above in standardized math tests. Yes, the study is at an early stage – but the magnitude of this effect is far larger than that of any reform strategy tested in other research.

What accounts for such a powerful effect? In large part, principals’ ability – with greater control over such core school issues as budgets, staffing, curriculum and scheduling – to reduce “total student load.”

Total student load (TSL) may be the single most important fact to know about a school, particularly a middle school or high school. Put simply, it’s the number of papers that a teacher has to grade and the number of students he or she must get to know each term.

In New York high schools, the traditional union contract has specified a maximum of 170 students in five classes of 34 students each. So, every semester, teachers must get to know up to 170 adolescents and form a sufficient bond with each one to be able to push them to do their best. Teachers say that’s impossible.

The challenge for principals is to get TSL down to 80 or 90 students per teacher without extra funding. Our research shows that when New York principals control budgets, they work with teachers and staff to do exactly that.

Some principals have decided they can do without such support staff as security guards or attendance clerks, and used the money for more classroom teachers. In several schools, principals reduced TSL by combining English and social studies into a humanities course or math and science into a math-science integrated course. Some principals invented ways to schedule classes so that all students could have a one-on-one office-hour visit with any teacher they desired.

With principals expected to meet challenges not asked of their predecessors, how to ensure an ample supply of educators capable of doing so? The city’s answer is the Aspiring Principals Program, a 14-month-long, full-time program. In one recent year, it attracted 1,400 aspirants – and admitted 66. As a management professor for almost four decades, I’ve never seen an executive-training program better than this one, including such vaunted programs as those at IBM, General Electric and Hewlett Packard.

In short, New York City schools, along with other urban districts our team studied, are in an era of dynamic innovation. Experience shows that continuity of leadership is essential in consolidating gains – a point that has acquired increased salience with the possibility that Mayor Bloomberg will seek a third term.

William G. Ouchi, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, is the author of “Making Schools Work.”