Limited Control and Relentless Accountability: Examining Historical Changes in Urban School Principal Pressure

Abstract

Influential texts have long identified principals as being essential to school success. Accordingly, high expectations and pressures have attended the principalship and affected the professionals who occupy it. This exploration asked three interrelated questions: What pressures have urban school principals typically faced, in the past and today? What new pressures have emerged? What effects have these pressures had on principals and the prospect for lasting urban school improvement? To answer these questions, historical and contemporary artifacts were analyzed, as well as data from interviews with 17 principals from one large urban district. Findings indicate that today, even more so than in the past, the urban principalship is characterized by extensive responsibilities and limited control, nested in a context of relentless accountability.

Accountability, autonomy and stress: principal responses to superintendent change in a large US urban school district

“…The urban school principal remains constrained by extensive managerial responsibilities that complicate a position that scholars and reform advocates have positioned as the central means to improve a school's teaching, curriculum and student achievement (Hallinger and Murphy 2013;Leithwood, Harris, and Hopkins 2008;Terosky 2014). When principals are publicly positioned to receive punitive consequences if student outcomes fail to meet district office or state expectations, the situation generates significant mental stress that decreases creativity as well as productivity (West, Peck, and Reitzug 2010). The urban school principal continues to work long hours to fulfil countless expectations, generating unhealthy principals who ignore nutritional and physical necessities -and as in the case of one of our principals, ignore safe driving practices.…”

“…A concern in the USA is the pressure on school leaders and an increased rate of principal turnover (Cushing, Kerrins, and Johnstone 2003;McGhee and Nelson 2005;Nelson, McGhee, and Meno 2007;West, Peck, and Reitzug 2010). In addition, studies have emerged demonstrating how US school leadership candidates' perceptions that the principalship is a stressful position have deterred them from entering school administration (DiPaola and TschannenMoran 2003; Gajda and Militello 2008).…”

“…Interviews were audio-taped and transcribed. This data was the foundation for a previous manuscript we published on urban school principal pressure and stress (West, Peck, and Reitzug 2010). So great was the stress and pressure in the district at the time, that many of the participating principals cried during the interview.…”

“…Finally, what effects did superintendent change have on principal stress and pressure? To address our research questions, we first reexamined interviews we had conducted with 17 principals in the district in 2007; the interview transcripts constituted a data-set that became part of a published manuscript (West, Peck, and Reitzug 2010). We then revisited the district in 2013 and conducted interviews with 10 principals, including 5 who had participated in our previous study.…”

Managing Adaptive Challenges

“…(p. 378) Importantly, while administrators certainly need support in fulfilling technical aspects of their work (e.g., budgets, schedules), new demands (e.g., our current accountability atmosphere, standards-based reform) mean that many challenges are adaptive as well. In other words, as suggested earlier, leaders need to learn new approaches, develop greater internal capacities (e.g., social-emotional and developmental) to manage complexity and ambiguity, and gain knowledge about how to support other adults' learning and growth-while in the process of working on daunting challenges with only limited control over the most relevant factors (West, Peck, & Reitzug, 2010). Challenges like these require greater attention to building leadership capacity by learning how to support one's own and other adults' growth to exercise good leadership.…”