The beginning of a beautiful relationship : America’s principals and the United States Department of Education

Abstract

The education research and practice communities are in agreement; principals matter, they are of central importance in our nation’s effort to improve schools for all students. Yet, the principalship is misunderstood. There are mixed views on what makes a principal effective, competing demands, and inordinate expectations placed on the role. Over the past fifty years as its education policy has grown in influence, and especially since the passing of NCLB, the federal government has made the situation for principals even more complicated and tenuous as it has neglected to get to know these important practitioners. Aware that something needed to be done but not sure how to proceed, the United States Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and his leadership team, in the Spring of 2012, sought to create a principal and instructional leader strategy. I was hired a year later to spearhead this work. Before such a strategy could be created, though, it was important to build a relationship between principals and federal policymakers. Using a design thinking framework, this capstone represents my effort to better understand the role of principals, the role of federal education policy in our nation’s schools, and the convergence of the two. In it I describe the development of a feedback loop between principals and policymakers that can serve as a model for future policy development. Through an analysis of data gathered from a review of literature, roundtable discussions, and a survey, the feedback loop process uncovers and calls into question an underlying assumption by the Department about principal leadership and its association to instructional leadership. In the end, implications for both the Department and Education and the sector as a whole are considered.