Principals Without Power
06/29/2010
Katherine Poythress/Civil Beat
How would you like to be the boss and not have control over who's on your team?
That's the situation Hawaii school principals say they find themselves in — and they're not happy about it. It isn't new. What is new is that state and federal education reform places demands — and expectations — on principals that they say they can't meet unless they're treated more like CEOs and less like bureaucrats.
The Hawaii State Board of Education chairman says principals have plenty of authority, but the deputy superintendent of the Hawaii Department of Education says administrators know hiring is an area that needs improvement.
Principals said "flexibility and empowerment for hiring of teachers" is the No. 1 thing that could empower them as school leaders, in response to a recent survey conducted by the Principals Planning Group. The group was formed this year to ensure principals were a meaningful part of the current education reform conversation.
"If you want to hold me accountable, you have to give me the ability to control the staffing at the school," John Sosa, principal of Kaiser High School, told Civil Beat. "The most important thing that goes on here is interaction between teachers and students."
Sosa speaks as a former teacher, former administrator at both school and central office levels and former superintendent of a small school district in Washington.
The topic of principals' authority has come to the forefront in part due to Hawaii's "Reinventing Education Act of 2004" — also known as Act 51 — which required principals to develop and implement contracts that would hold them accountable for their performance. That hasn't happened. But the federal Race to the Top grant program has escalated the discussion, because one of its objectives is to help school districts recruit and retain effective principals and teachers. Local politicians have been jumping on the bandwagon, too. Training to help principals become "effective CEOs of their schools" is a key component of gubernatorial candidate Neil Abercrombie's decentralizing education platform, and three former Democratic governors have started a movement to, among other things, give Hawaii's principals more power.
