The Assistant Principal: Leadership Choices and Challenges

by Catherine Marshall, Richard M. Hooley

Overview

This updated edition supports the intrinsic value of the assistant principalship, provides improvement suggestions, offers recruitment ideas, and reframes the job within school leadership.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761931522
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	03/21/2006
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	3 Months

About the Author

Catherine Marshall is the William Eaves Distinguished Professor Emerita of Educational Leadership and Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After completing her PhD, she served on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania and at Vanderbilt University before settling as professor at North Carolina. The ongoing goal of her teaching and research has been to use an interdisciplinary approach to analyze the cultures of schools, state policy cultures, gender issues, and social justice issues. She has published extensively on the politics of education, qualitative methodology, women's access to careers, and socialization, language, and values in educational administration.

Marshall's honors include the Campbell Award for Lifetime Intellectual Contributions to the Field, given by the Politics of Education Association (2009); the University Council for Educational Administration's Campbell Award for Lifetime Achievement and Contributions to Educational Administration (2008); the American Educational Research Association's (AERA) Willystine Goodsell Award for her scholarship, activism, and community building on behalf of women and education (2004); and a Ford Foundation grant for Social Justice Leadership (2002). In the American Educational Association, she was elected to head the Politics and Policy Division, and she also created an AERA Special Interest Group called Leadership for Social Justice.

Marshall is the author or editor of numerous other books. These include Activist Educators: Breaking Past Limits; Culture and Education Policy in the American States; The Assistant Principal: Leadership Choices and Challenges; The New Politics of Gender and Race; and Feminist Critical Policy Analysis. This book's origin came early in her scholarly career, while conducting qualitative research on policy and teaching literally hundreds of doctoral students how to adopt and adapt the qualitative approach into workable proposals. She recognized a need and began to develop this book.

Richard Hooley is the Superintendent of the Valley Central Schools in the Hudson Valley of New York. Although his advancement was fairly traditional, he was interested in those who reached high administrative posts by nontraditional routes. In his research of this topic, the assistant principal was identified as an often pivotal position. Having worked as an administrator in the southeast, the northeast and the southwest, his fascination continues even as the assistant principal role changes over time and in the large and small districts he has worked in across the country. Now as a superintendent, seeking to encourage and develop educational leaders in his district, the topic remains germane and only more complicated by the declining numbers of educators going into administration and the increasing demands set by state and federal accountability measures. Richard taught high school English after earning his bachelor's degree from Wake Forest University. He also earned a masters degree there in Gifted Education before attending Teachers College, Columbia University where he earned a second masters and a doctorate in Curriculum and Teaching.

Table of Contents

	Preface	vii
	Acknowledgments	x
	About the Authors	xi
1	What Is Special About Assistant Principals?	1
	Unanswered Questions and Continuing Dilemmas	3
	What Do Assistant Principals Do? The Nature of the Tasks and Roles	5
	Role Ambiguity	7
	Role Conflict and Overload	7
	Job Satisfaction and "Dissatisfaction"	9
	Career Incentives	10
	Policy Concerns in the Assistant Principal Role	12
	Recruiting and Retaining Leaders	12
	Identifying Appropriate Training and Selection Systems	13
	Encouraging Innovators	14
	Encouraging Instructional Leaders	16
	Providing Equal Opportunity	17
	Empowerment and Participatory Management	20
	The Plateaued Assistant	22
	Recent Realizations and Developments Affecting the Assistant	23
	Summary	25
	Discussion Questions and Activities	25
2	How Do Assistant Principals Get Their Jobs?	27
	The Case of Tim George	27
	The Case of Alicia Brown	32
	How Assistant Principals Learn About the Role	34
	Career Decision-Making	34
	Anticipating the Roles	35
	Role Model Learning	36
	Task Learning	36
	Professional Socialization: The Mix of Formal and Informal Training	37
	Aspiration Building and Self-Selection	39
	The Formal Selection Process	40
	The Informal Assessment Process	42
	Ambiguous and Negotiated Expectations	43
	Recent Trends Affecting Recruitment Into the Position	44
	Crisis Recruitment	44
	Early Exiting	45
	Balancing "The Look" in School Sites	45
	Summary	46
	Discussion Questions and Activities	47
3	Progress in Understanding the Assistant Principal's Role	49
	Research on the Work and Work Arrangements	50
	Research on the Socialization of the Assistant Principal	52
	Constraints on Behavior and Values: Assumptive Worlds	55
	Right and Responsibility to Initiate	55
	Acceptable and Unacceptable Values	56
	Patterns of Expected Behavior	57
	School Site Conditions Affecting Political Relationships	58
	Implications of Assumptive Worlds	58
	Orientations to the Position	61
	Details From the Case Studies	62
	New Research Insights	67
	Factors Affecting Assistant Principals	68
	A Focus on the Career Assistant Principal	68
	Career Assistant Principals' Rewards and Satisfactions	70
	Research on Styles of Achieving	71
	Research on Emotional Work	73
	An International Perspective	75
	Summarizing Insights From Complexities	76
	Discussion Questions and Activities	77
4	Opportunities for Improving the Assistant Principalship	79
	Training and Certification Policies	80
	University and Professional Training	82
	Staff Development	85
	Assistant Principal Conferences	87
	Selection Policies	88
	Instructional Leadership	94
	Achieving Equity in Administration	96
	Satisfiers, Supports, and Coping Strategies	103
	So What Does Give Satisfaction, Long-Term?	106
	Progress in Valuing the Role	107
	Opening Up the Realm of Emotion and Moral Purpose	110
	Facing Fundamental Dilemmas	111
	Reforms	111
	Summary	115
	Discussion Questions and Activities	116
5	A New and Different Assistant Principalship	119
	Specific Alterations in the Current System	121
	Defining Roles, Tasks, and Functions	121
	Participatory Management	125
	Affiliation-Support Groups	126
	Discretionary Power and Recognition	127
	Reassessing the Value of Assistant Principals	129
	Promoting the Value of Assistant Principal Functions	129
	Preparation, Recruitment, and Selection	131
	University and Professional Training	131
	Sponsors, Role Models, and Mentors	133
	Internships	135
	Recruitment and Selection	135
	Certification	138
	Staff Development, Workshops, Celebrations, and Special Conferences	139
	A Deeper Cut: Changing Professional and Cultural Assumptions	141
	Reconceptualizing Assumptions About Administration	142
	Shifting Dominant Views of Schooling	142
	Alternative Leadership Theories and Models	145
	Transformative Leadership	146
	Leaders as Critical Humanists	146
	Intentional Leadership	148
	Feminist Perspectives on Leadership	149
	Emotionally Engaged, Relational, and Caring Leadership	152
	Viewing Administration as Leadership of Identity-Negotiation Organizations	153
	Leadership as Expanding Schools' Social Capital	154
	Power-Sensitive Leadership	155
	Social Justice Leadership	156
	Policy Advocacy Leadership	157
	Looking at Equity in the Profession Through Cultural and Political Lenses	159
	Purposefully Examining Fundamental Dilemmas	163
	Reframing and Re-visioning Fundamental Assumptions of Schooling	165
	Training for New Metaphors and Theories for Enacting Leadership	167
	Summary	170
	Discussion Questions and Activities	172
	References	175
	Index	186

Editorial Reviews

"Highly recommended for all educators and school administrators searching for a well authored and highly detailed presentation of the difficult role and responsibilities of the assistant principal."

Wisconsin Bookwatch Education Shelf

A comprehensive study of what assistant principals do and who they are, as well as how these "administrators-in-training" can take charge of their careers. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews