New professional standards for CA principals approved

by Tom Chorneau

(Calif.) Setting a clear expectation that schools should be a place of safety and fairness, the Commission on Teacher Credentialing adopted Thursday new standards for school principals that embrace restorative justice practices.

The standards, adopted more than a decade ago as some of the first in the nation to set comprehensive goals for school leaders, are intended to serve as a basis for measuring competence throughout the career of today’s site principals, district administrators and county level managers.

Although a key element of the new standards is a series of non-binding example indicators, architects of the program said the detailed description of desired activity should prove valuable to school managers as well as parents and policy makers.

“We spent a lot of time discussing whether these should be sample indicators or required elements – we want to be clear, these are items that you could use to evaluate but there are others,” said Teri Burns, a senior policy director at the California School Boards Association and a member of the work group that designed the standards update.

“This is the kind of document that allows members of a school board to say this is what we expect from our folks in the field,” she said. “And the kind of document that will help us explain it to parents.”

Known as the California Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, the management protocols were originally adopted by the CTC in 2001, based largely on conduct goals developed by the Council of Chief State School Officers only a few years earlier.

In the time since, the work of a school principal has changed dramatically and is set to change again as the state transitions to new Common Core standards, new accountability measures and a new budgeting system where more spending decisions will be made locally.

Toward that end, the new school leader standards include a long section on goals surrounding family and community engagement – requirements that schools must meet as a condition of receiving billions in additional state support under the governor’s Local Control Funding Formula.

Among the example indicators for the engagement section are:

Establish a welcoming environment for family participation in education by recognizing and respecting diverse family goals and aspirations for students.

Communicate regularly with all parents and families in ways that are accessible and understandable.

Engage families with staff to establish academic programs and supports that address individual and collective student assets and needs.

The standards also cover new expectations that school leaders reach out to the private sector in support of such programs as linked learning and project based learning:

Seek out and collaborate with community programs and services that assist students who need academic, mental, linguistic, cultural, social-emotional, physical, or other support to succeed in school.

Secure community support to sustain existing resources and add new resources that address emerging student needs.

Perhaps also responding to a contemporary issue, the new standards provide stronger directives on student discipline – an issue that has raised concern from federal civil rights officials after findings that minority and special education students were disproportionately targets of suspension and expulsion during the past three years.

As such, school principals will be asked to strengthen school climate through “engagement, connection and a sense of belonging among all students and staff.” Here, example indicators include:

Implement a positive and equitable behavior management system with intervention and prevention strategies and protocols that are clear, fair, incremental, restorative, culturally responsive, and celebrate student and school achievement.

Consistently monitor, review and respond to attendance, disciplinary, and other relevant data to improve school climate and student engagement and ensure that management practices are free from bias and equitably applied to all students.

With Thursday’s action, the new standards become part of the state’s certification program although programs that prepare candidates for the administrative credential will need to incorporate the revised expectations as part of the training – something that could take several years to fully secure.