Principal Training on the Ground: Ensuring Highly Qualified Leadership

As our nation faces a severe principal shortage, Sandra Stein and Liz Gewirtzman offer a timely breakthrough--a detailed overview and explanation of a principal training model that can easily be implemented through school-university partnerships.

The authors base their book on the Aspiring Leaders Program (ALP), a collaboration of several New York City school districts and the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College, The City University of New York. The program takes a unique approach to principal development that integrates the craft knowledge of master practitioners with the theoretical knowledge and research of college professors. Stein and Gewirtzman provide not only a provocative rationale for radically transforming school leadership development through such a program, but also a practical guide to get there through a model that includes:

• systems of accountability
• cycles of continuous improvement
• responsiveness to local realities
• delivery of a rigorous curriculum
• instruction as the center of the principal's role.

To address the problem of quality leadership in education, administrators and government policy makers can find no more effective approach than the one offered here.