Education Week - February 19, 2014 - Cultivating Leadership - C4

By Katie Ash
David Britten, the superintendent of the 1,800-student
Godfrey-Lee school district in
Wyoming, Mich., said the activity he sees in his schools has
changed dramatically over the
past five years.
Between classes, students
walk the hallways texting
their families and friends. They
bring their laptops and tablets
to school to take notes in class.
And Mr. Britten himself regularly uses the district's Facebook page to reach out to and
connect with students, parents,
educators, and the community.
"That's part of the game now,"
said the superintendent.
In fact, as a result of the shifting educational landscape-in
large part because of technological changes-what it means to
be a superintendent today is far
different from what it was just
a few years ago, he and others
say.
"In the past, the superintendent was more of a keeper of the
status quo," said Mr. Britten.
"Most communities were quite
proud of their school districts
and happy with them, and what
they wanted was somebody to
come in and make sure it operates smoothly for as long as
they're there."
That's no longer true, he said.
"The superintendent's role is
having to change to become
more of an instigator of change,"
he said. "And technology plays a
big role in that."
It's a phenomenon that Keith
R. Krueger, the chief executive
officer of the Washington-based
Consortium for School Networking, or CoSN, has also noticed.
"There's been a sea change in
the view of what [the superintendent's] role is," he said. "Increasingly, they have to have
the vision around what's possible around technology."
That doesn't mean that the

superintendent has to own
every new gadget that comes
out or know how each one
works, said Mr. Krueger, but
today's district leader has to
establish a long-term vision for
a district that provides a path
toward a digital conversion.
"I think superintendents are
very much into talking about a
digital conversion, but the hitch
is that few of them know how
to do it," he said. "We actually
have to do something different,
and it can't just be small little
test beds. At some point, we
have to have a plan for scaling."
That means not just buying
100 iPads and handing them
to teachers, said Jayson Richardson, an associate professor of educational leadership
at the University of Kentucky,
but rather thinking about what
kind of long-term infrastructure
is needed to support those devices and how they will be used
to improve teaching and learning.
"We've noticed that the folks
who are struggling, they don't
really think proactively about
what [technology purchases]
are going to mean for networking, electricity, [and other factors at the district]," he said.
And it's not just the superintendent who has to have the
vision, said Mr. Richardson. He
or she also needs to be able to
clearly communicate it to school
board members, principals,
teachers, students, parents. and
other members of the community.
"It's shared, not top-down,"
Mr. Richardson said of that vision.

A New Chain of Command
Clear and transparent communication is a priority that Mr.
Britten, from Michigan's Godfrey-Lee schools, has embraced.
He maintains two separate blogs
about what's going on in the dis-

Report: How to Grow a
Farm Team for Principals
By Lesli A. Maxwell
When a pitcher gets hurt and hampers a team's starting rotation, Major League baseball managers have
robust minor league rosters to tap for a well-prepared
replacement.
What would it take for school districts to cultivate a
similar bench of talent to draw from when they need new
principals-especially principals to lead the most challenged public schools?
Bain & Company, the global management-consulting
firm based in Boston, takes on those questions and more
in a recent report on school leadership. Written by members of Bain's education consulting division, the report
outlines common barriers to grooming more high-quality
school leaders and strategies for how districts and char4

Leah Nash for Education Week

K-12 Leaders Shift From Protectors of Status Quo to Change Agents

Steven Webb, the superintendent of schools in Vancouver, Wash., watches as students Damon Reinhardt, 12,
left, and Philip Morgan, 13, work on a geography project using the app "Pic-Collage" in a 7th grade
combined language arts/Washington state history class at Alki Middle School.

trict and personally manages
the district's Facebook page, he
said.
"I want to make sure the communication is getting out there
and it's real communication," he
said, "not glossing over stuff to
make the district look good."
Superintendents across the
country are now communicating more directly with community members than in the past,
said Rowland Baker, the executive director of the Technology
Information Center for Administrative Leadership, or TICAL,
in Santa Cruz, Calif. The center,
which operates out of the Santa
Cruz County Office of Education,
helps train administrators in
how to use and implement technology effectively in their school
districts.
These days, when parents or
members of the public want to

voice an opinion about something happening in a school or
district, they often fire off an
email to the superintendent,
rather than set up a meeting or
phone call, Mr. Baker said.
"The chain of command used
to be more evident. Now it's
more flattened," he said. "The
good part is that now people feel
this intimate relationship with
the leadership, but the inverse
is that the superintendent's job
is now 24-7."
Mr. Baker recommends that
superintendents cultivate a
strong support staff around
them to delegate the slew of
daily requests they receive and
alleviate their workload. He also
cautions superintendents to develop a thick skin.
"It's easy when you're anonymous to sit back and throw
rocks, so how do you, as a leader,

ter-management organizations can think and operate
more like professional sports managers when it comes to
developing principal talent.
"First, we don't have enough people who want to [be
principals]," said Chris Bierly, the head of Bain's education practice and a coauthor of the report. "And then the
roles that people are in that should be steppingstones to
becoming principals aren't developmentally rich enough
to give them the skills they need."

Career Appeal Lacking
Bain, which conducted surveys of teachers, teacherleaders, assistant principals, and principals working in
seven districts and in five charter-management organizations for its report, found that most teachers and
teacher-leaders who responded have no interest in becoming school leaders. And even among the assistant
principals surveyed-positions that should be obvious
steppingstones to running a school-more than one-third
said they didn't want the top job.
Mr. Bierly said the survey also exposed a divide between how principals and teachers view school leadership positions. Most principals reported high satisfaction

Education Week 2 0 1 4 CA LENDA R O F EVENT S & P ROFESSIONAL DEVELOP MENT DIRECT ORY

keep a good perspective and not
get rattled when somebody says
something inappropriate?" Mr.
Baker asked.
One of the critical relationships superintendents should
focus on is between themselves
and their technology directors,
said Scott McLeod, the founding director of the Center for
the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, or
CASTLE, which is based at the
University of Kentucky.
Superintendents must make
sure their technology directors
are people they can trust who
will serve as facilitators of innovation, rather than as gatekeepers, Mr. McLeod said.
"Superintendents often just
listen to the tech coordinator. We
see that all the time," he said.
"You don't want to defer to the
tech coordinator who is working

with their work and said they had been placed in a position where they could be successful. But when teachers
were asked about the appeal of the principal's job, they
saw it as a much less attractive option.
"If you as a school system aren't actively promoting
the benefits and the appeal of moving down a leadership
pathway, and your school leaders themselves aren't the
spokespeople for those jobs, you are leaving something
very important on the table," Mr. Bierly said.
Andrés A. Alonso, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, agreed that many school systems haven't set up a "deliberate system" of developing
school leaders and that much of the conversation about
the work of principals is how hard it is rather than how
fulfilling it can be.
"There is clearly a need to balance that narrative," said
Mr. Alonso, who was the chief executive officer of the Baltimore schools for six years, a position he left last spring.
But, he said, there needs to be more acknowledgement
that successful principals now have to be political, managerial, and instructional leaders.
"To help leaders be all of those things requires much
more purposeful and rigorous systems to get them there,"
he said.

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Education Week - February 19, 2014 - Cultivating Leadership

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