“A Job Too Big for One”: Multiple Principals and Other Nontraditional Approaches to School Leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Current federal, state, and local school accountability measures as well as policy initiatives that call for improved leadership have placed increasing demands on principals. Many districts face shortages of appropriate candidates for the job; popularly, this shortage is explained by the fact that simply too few hero-principals exist for all openings available, particularly in high-needs districts. An alternative to finding the perfect—and rare—candidate for an increasingly untenable position is to restructure the job itself. Purpose: This article examines 10 schools that have adopted alternative structures: schools with two principals, three principals, and rotating principals and a school with the principal’s duties distributed among teachers. These 10 sites provide examples of alternative ways of organizing school leadership with varying benefits and challenges. Research Methods: Data collection at the 10 schools included site visits conducted by a team of researchers, interviews with principals, teacher leaders, and district supervisors. Observational and interview protocols were adapted from the Northwestern University Distributed Leadership Study. These protocols focus on uncovering not only how school site leaders explain their decisions but also on providing evidence of what those decisions are. Interview and observational data were organized into thematic codes to permit cross-case comparison. Findings: We observed the idiosyncratic ways in which schools and districts approached the policy dilemmas associated with attempts to change the default administrative structure of principal and assistant principal. Some schools with coprincipals, for example, thrived; others struggled. Where local school sites participated actively with the policy-making process that produced these arrangements, the alternative seemed viable. Where alternatives were imposed without school input, implementation floundered. The findings analyze the origins of the reforms, school site roles, costs and benefits, the role of the district, and the long-term stability of the approach. Implications: In this article, we describe the experiences of 10 schools that have experimented with alternative arrangements for school site leadership. These experiences offer schools, districts, school boards, and researchers a series of questions to consider as they contemplate reforming the principalship itself rather than (or in addition to) preparing and searching for competent principals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".