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There is a silent crisis undermining school improvement efforts. As in any major organizational change effort, leadership is a key ingredient to success. However, in educational leadership, the abilities to communicate, coordinate, and make decisions are not enough to address the “painful” trade-offs regularly faced by leaders in education. Their challenge is not just about making good decisions, which is daunting enough. They must also manage highly-public and often emotionally-charged issues among a diverse student and adult population. The state of our leadership pipeline, though, and our efforts to support their work, call for a dramatic shift in approach.
The data about educational leadership paint a stark picture of the challenge facing education today, especially in our most underserved communities. To convey the true level of urgency, imagine reading the following in a Monday morning news article:
“In Congressional testimony today, researchers uncovered that 90% of current doctors feel they are responsible for everything that happens to patients, and 75% feel their job has become too complex. At least half of current doctors feel under great stress several days a week. Roughly 20% of doctors leave each year, half of the doctors will leave their position within four years, and the rates are considerably higher in low-income communities. Each turnover costs the organization $75,000. Roughly 70% of the traditional pipeline for doctors has no interest in assuming the position; the largest group now in that pipeline has only one year of experience. All of this is occurring as medicine implements its most ambitious increase in quality standards and accountability in decades.”
By Friday of that same week, after the blogosphere had ignited furiously in indignation, one would expect a stunning bipartisan agreement, even in these partisan times, to form a national blue-ribbon commission to address the crisis in the medical profession.
Given that those numbers are real, now, for school leaders in the US, the level of public concern seems muted at best, and dangerously silent at worst. At a time of intensified scrutiny, rising academic aspirations, and broadened social-emotional support expectations, we face an unstable and over-stressed leadership in K-12, especially in institutions in our lower-income communities.
This serves no one well. Research published by the Wallace Foundation and others has shown that next to teaching, leadership is the school-related factor that most contributes to what students learn at school; indeed, good principals serve as multipliers of effective teaching. Higher-quality principals correlate to lower teacher turnover and increased teacher satisfaction, with greater impact in disadvantaged schools.