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NEPC Review: Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement (Thomas B. Fordham Institute, June 2014) and Great Principals at Scale: Creating District Conditions that Enable All Principals to be Effective (George W. Bush Institute and New Leaders, June 2014)

These two reports focus on the need for more effective principals to improve school qual­ity. Each includes a sensible discussion of workplace conditions affecting the principal pipeline and contributing to leadership effectiveness. Great Principals at Scale recom­mends better school and district alignment of goals and strategies, along with district-pro­vided support structures and greater local autonomy for principals. Lacking Leaders examines the hiring practices in five school districts and identifies ineffective hiring prac­tices as contributing to a pipeline problem; it argues that attracting the best candidates will require additional remuneration, greater autonomy over staffing decisions, and in­creased district-level collaboration. The headline policy recommendation is to increase salaries $100,000 above current levels to attract more effective principals into the pipe­line. No research in the report, however, justifies the size of the salary recommendation or demonstrates salary as the most important factor influencing principal recruitment, selec­tion, or retention. Also, while both reports focus on the principal as the primary source of leadership in schools, neither considers other important sources of leadership. Both re­ports suggest leadership and management skills found in many organizational settings outside of education are easily or directly transferable to education. This suggestion, how­ever, underestimates the human context of teaching and learning. These and other limita­tions undermine the usefulness of the reports’ resulting recommendations.

Documents Reviewed:

Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement

Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke; with Chester Finn and Amber Northern
Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Great Principals at Scale: Creating District Conditions that Enable All Principals to be Effective

Gina Ikemoto, Lori Taliaferro, Benjamin Fenton, and Jacquelyn Davis
George W. Bush Institute and New Leaders