Information for Principals & School Leaders

A Middle School Principal Pursuing "radical reform"
Canton Middle School, an? inner-city Baltimore school, has been the focus of a radical restructuring. A report by? Teacher magazine states that principal Craig Spilman "has done away with tracking and grade levels, replacing them with multiage teams of students who stay with the same group of teachers from year to year. Read how teachers organize their days and programs as they deem important to achieve their educational goals."


? This weekly electronic newsletter from NASSP updates school leaders on the latest developments in federal education policy and school law, education news from around the nation, and NASSP's efforts to support principals nationwide.


The National Association of Secondary School Principals? publications NASSP Bulletin and Principal Leadership provides insight into many topics and issues of interest to building principals.

Building Better Principals
Research indicates "principals make a big difference in shaping the education that goes on in a school."

Ensuring Equity with Alternative Assessments (1/15/98)
A critical issues report from NCREL which discusses the promises and the challenges inherent in using alternative assessment practices to make decisions.

FairTest: The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
This is an advocacy organization seeking to end the abuses, misuses and flaws of standardized testing and ensure that evaluation of students and workers is fair, open and educationally sound.

Followership and Leadership
The leadership development efforts of AASA focus primarily on its professional development conferences and seminars and the AASA Center for System Leadership.? .

High Stakes Tests Do Not Improve Student Learning (3/18/98)
A FairTest Report by Monty Neill? ?

Improving Student Achievement: What NAEP State Test Scores Tell Us
Rand researchers find Texas first, California last in cross-state NAEP comparison

Job-Embedded Principal Training
"Quietly, under cover of educational lingo and university requirements, reformers around the country have established beachheads of clinical education for principals. The programs view schools -- not university lecture halls -- as the proper training ground for future leaders, and they put student learning as job one for principals." so says "Building on Experience," Education Week, 5/3/00. Come and read all about it!

Leadership Qualities Needed to Change Schools
The Institute for Responsive Education identifies qualities believed to be necessary for those leading educational reform.


Barbara Neufeld, Harvard researcher, describes what her research says about middle school principals and characteristic of what qualities it takes to be leaders of school reform.


Hayes Mizell interviewed for the Jan.1999 issue of "Ink", a newsletter published by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.? Participants in the "Principals Make a Difference" project on middle grades standards-based reform (funded by the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation) received a copy of this work.? Many topics of great interest to school leaders appear in this work.

New Superintendents E-Journal
The AASA New Superintendents E-Journal is a quarterly electronic newsletter written specifically for those who are in their first months and years of the superintendency. Even if you are a veteran superintendent who just landed a job in a new district, these e-journal articles provide a refresher course on issues to keep front and center during the early tenure of your new post.

Portrait of the Super Principal
This? Harvard Education Letter seeks to identify ways to attract administrators in spite of all of the drawbacks the job issues.

Preparing Principals for Complex Leadership
This? February 2001 issue of "Strategies," published by AASA and the Panasonic Foundation, examines? three school systems dedicate to building principals' capacity to meet new challenges. You will discover the secrets shard by? Hamilton Co. of Chattanooga TN's principal leadership center.


Jefferson County, KY principals describe how they became "leaders of standards-based reform,"


Middle school principals discuss and evaluate samples of student work.


Come to this site to read how? Central Park East Elementary School has improved its instructional strategies.


Join a middle school principal as she describes lessons learned during her internship.

Principal Leadership Drives Middle School Reform Agenda
Principals in Jefferson County, KY work to identify? their role in leadership and supporting structures to achieve their goals.? Read about the? exchange among the principals about how they examine student work.

Prisoners of Time
The National Education Commission on Time and Learning presents its findings and recommendations regarding the management of instructional and professional development time in this report.

Reinventing the Principalship
Read this report in PDF format? from the Institute for Educational Leadership,? "Leadership for Student Learning: Reinventing the Principalship". The contents is from the work of IEL's Task Force on Principal Leadership. Find out how? "The core mission of the principalship must be redefined as leadership for student learning. Communities must fill the pipeline with effective school leaders...and guarantee quality and results."


Read what the director of the Boston Plan for Excellence describes as the progress of an initiative that has "change" coaches and "content" coaches offering principals and teachers "the kind of professional development that research says is most effective in schools that have active ongoing change......" This information comes from the KAPPAN article of June 2001.


Hayes Mizell offers the definition of an achieving middle school:? "It is a school whose mission, ethos, culture, structure, organization, curriculum, co-curriculum, and instruction is explicitly dedicated to the achievement of every student and every adult in the building. It is a school where from the time a visitor walks in the front door there is no doubt that the school's focus is on advancing the achievement of every student and every adult.... In the achieving middle school the administrators, teachers, and students understand that they all have something to teach and a lot to learn." Come and read more from Mizell.

Standards for School Leaders
The Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC), a program of the Council of Chief State School Officers, whose mission is developing school standards "forged from research on productive educational leadership and the wisdom of colleagues, the standards were drafted by personnel from 24 state education agencies and representatives from various professional associations. The standards present a common core of knowledge, dispositions, and performances that will help link leadership more forcefully to productive schools and enhanced educational outcomes." PDF Format (Adobe Acrobat required)

Strategies For School System Leaders on District-Level Change
The Panasonic Foundation collaborating with the American Association of School Administrators report on various issues.

The Leadership Institute's Benchmarking Consortium shows off its data analysis tool (2/24/06)

Technological Literacy for Administrators
Seven rubrics offered from the School Administrator ? magazine may help school leaders determine how? to best? use information technologies. "Planning for good administrative use of technology also requires that administrators assess their own technological skills so they can plan for their own professional development needs." A must read article for those who lead schools where technology integration is not fully deployed.


What "habits of mind & heart" help school leaders guide successful school change over time? Summary of a USDE study with link to complete document.

What Makes Principals "Highly Successful"?
Read the results of a survey completed from Washington State principals. They were asked to determine the factors? likely to prevent schools from raising student achievement. The results identified the lack of visionary leadership. Find more about this? study by Seattle Pacific University in this Education World article.
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