Competing pressures put strain on school principals

This from the Ventura County Star:

Principals are facing shrinking budgets and mounting responsibilities to lead teachers and keep schools running — creating competing pressures that may make the job untenable, a study has found.

Principals reported working 60 and sometimes 70 hours a week. As budget cuts thinned the ranks of support staff, they juggled roles as teachers, community liaisons, nurses, athletic directors, crisis managers and budget gurus.

"The consensus was that even if a principal can do each of several things well, it is tremendously difficult to do them all well at the same time," according to the recently released report from the Center for the Future of Teaching & Learning at WestEd, a San Francisco-based nonprofit group.

As part of its research, the group surveyed 600-plus principals throughout California and followed up with phone interviews with principals, veteran teachers and other administrators. A third of principals said a lack of time created barriers to improving teacher quality.

Meanwhile, the state has an increasingly veteran teacher workforce and a relatively inexperienced corps of principals, the study states. Half of the state's principals have been in the job for five or fewer years, based on survey results. Half have been at their schools for three or fewer years...

Principals the focus of pay for performance study

The Center for American Progress has released a study of principal compensation which views performance pay for principals as a necessary precursor to merit pay for teachers.

This from the Center for American Progress:

Principal Compensation:

More Research Needed on a Promising Reform

School reforms and improvements depend crucially on the implementation of strategies at the school level—from human resources to curriculum to parent involvement. And the successful implementation of these strategies in turn depends largely on principal leadership.

Few studies link principal attributes directly to student achievement, and of those that do, some are methodologically limited by data constraints. Tracing the impacts of principals on student achievement is also difficult because their actions may affect students through both direct and indirect avenues. For example, principals may directly affect students through curricular choices and indirectly affect them through hiring decisions that determine the quality of teachers in their schools. Despite these constraints, it is clear that principals have a profound influence: They play a crucial role in shaping their schools’ environments, which in turn influences the quality of
teachers in them.

Given the importance of principals, and the role of compensation in determining the quality of people who opt to pursue this career path, it is striking how little is known about the structure of principal compensation. We know how much principals are paid nationally on average and relative to teacher salaries, and how this has changed over time. Yet we have only a scattershot picture of issues such as the extent to which principal compensation is linked to specific principal credentials or characteristics, or covered by collective bargaining agreements; whether principals are financially rewarded for taking tough leadership assignments; and whether there is a link between their compensation and measures of their performance...