The fresh-brewed coffee and tempting assortment of donuts were going untouched in principal Ana Ponce’s office. Only two parents had arrived for “Coffee with Ms. Ponce” — an informal chat session with the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy middle school’s new leader.
Ponce M.Ed. ’02 had organized similar — and well-attended — get-togethers with parents a year earlier as principal of one of Camino Nuevo’s two elementary schools in the impoverished and densely populated MacArthur Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and she thought she would try to do the same in her new role at the middle school.
The idea of holding such assemblies to give parents — most of whom are Mexican and Central American immigrants — a chance to meet and talk with her about any issues they wished had been percolating in Ponce’s mind for some time, but it wasn’t until she completed UCLA’s Principal Leadership Institute (PLI) two years ago that she felt confident enough to translate the concept into practice.
“I think the institute validates activities like that,” she says. “There’s a strong emphasis on building relationships.”
On this day in September, however, Ponce’s attempts to build those relationships appeared to be falling flat, in spite of her effort to market the chat by in-school announcements and sending home fliers. In the end, though, all of the donuts and extra coffee didn’t go to waste; Ponce’s coffee talk with the two parents who did show up turned out to be her most effective advertising, as word-of-mouth about the meeting spread to others.
“At the next one there were 35 parents,” says Ponce. Now, when Ponce holds her chats, there’s no shortage of parents sipping coffee, snacking on sweets and discussing the school issues they feel are important.
Involving parents in the education of their children is just one of the challenges today’s school leaders face. But through programs like PLI in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, campus leaders learn new skills to address the complex issues facing school administrators in urban settings, from increased federal and state accountability to ensuring school safety and meeting the academic needs of an increasingly diverse student population.
The institute, which was founded in 2000, offers a 15-month, multidisciplinary program that strives to arm its students — full-time teachers, specialists and coordinators — with the skills necessary to meet those issues head-on and to bring about change in struggling schools. Those who complete the program receive a master’s degree and qualify for the credential they need to become a principal.
The program cuts across the spectrum of the university, with faculty from not only the education school but also from the UCLA Anderson School of Management and the School of Law.
“We decided this should be more than an education-school program,” says Bruce Newlin ’58, M.S. ’59, Ed.D. ’71, director of the institute. “So we brought in professors from other schools and tried to put together something unique that represented the best thinking on how you go about developing leaders for schools.”
And the schools where leaders are most needed are urban schools with diverse student populations and typically low achievement numbers, says Newlin.
“Not just those schools in downtown L.A., but a lot of schools throughout Los Angeles County meet that description,” he says. “We encourage [institute graduates] to stay in school districts where things aren’t where they need to be, to not run away from that.”
Schools in such communities often face the kinds of challenges that are raised by Stuart Biegel, who teaches in both the law and education schools, when he talks about the legal ramifications of a variety of issues on education.
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, for example, student test scores are the measure by which schools, and increasingly principals, are judged. “We can debate the efficacy of that law, but the reality is that it’s the law,” Biegel says. “And we have to deal with it.”
His role, then, is to discuss with PLI students the best practices under the law. He meets with public school principals every week, he says, to stay on top of these best practices, “so there’s a lot I can share.”
For many of the program’s participants, this multidisciplinary approach is a major appeal.
“I was most interested in the courses out of the management school,” says David Slagle M.Ed. ’03, dean of students at Eagle Rock Junior-Senior High School. Slagle graduated last year from PLI and says that the lessons he learned from Management Professor Samuel Culbert Ph.D. ’66 in particular have stayed with him.
“His course wasn’t about business, in terms of numbers,” Slagle says. “It was about assessing yourself as a person and understanding how you interact in groups and in individual situations. To manage and to lead, you need to have a good grasp of where you are as a person to be able to pull together a faculty of 120 [teachers]” or to serve as a liaison between teachers and parents, as his current job often requires.
Sonia Miller M.Ed. ’01 was among the first group of PLI graduates. A classroom teacher for 15 years, she says she enrolled because she wanted a greater level of involvement.
“I became more and more interested in the decision-making end of education,” says Miller, now the associate principal of Leuzinger High School in Lawndale. Though the institute’s overall mission is to focus primarily on urban schools, its courses have a broad application, Miller says, because they could be applied to “any school.”
Much of what is taught at PLI ties in with the school-administration approach that is advocated by one of the institute's noted faculty, William Ouchi, the Sanford and Betty Sigoloff Professor of Corporate Renewal in the Anderson School. In a highly regarded book published last year, Making Schools Work, Ouchi argues that for schools to succeed, more authority should be placed directly into the hands of school-site administrators.
After studying 223 public and Catholic schools in nine school systems in the United States and Canada, Ouchi concluded that “there was nothing wrong with the teachers, definitely nothing wrong with the students and there was enough money.” The problem, he says, was that the school-management system was too centralized, too top-heavy, too bureaucratic, and “it was strangling initiative in the individual schools.”
School systems, Ouchi says, aren’t very different from large businesses with multiple subunits: Those businesses can only operate successfully if they decentralize decision-making but have a tight accountability framework. For Ouchi, the ideal school-management scenario is one where the principal is a “consultative leader,” one who has final say but consults with the employees before making a decision. Most important, though, is for the individual school to have control over its own money so spending decisions can be tailored to meet the needs of the students in that school.
The notion seems simple enough — give principals control over their school’s budget and let them make decisions based on their specific needs — but it’s an idea that flies in the face of how schools have traditionally been run, with nearly 90 percent of individual school budgeting typically done at the district level.
“In most schools, salaries are about 85 percent of total spending,” says Ouchi. While a school doesn’t get to set salaries — that is done by the district — “the school needs to have control over those positions” and the salary money. “Some schools will want an extra music teacher and some will want an extra art teacher, and some other school may want a librarian who can perform administrative duties,” he says. Allowing the school administrators to make those types of “micro-adjustments” can have a big impact on student achievement, he says.
Howard Lappin ’61 offers an example of Ouchi’s idea in action.
A few years into his 12-year tenure as principal of Foshay Learning Center in South Central Los Angeles, Lapin and his staff found they had a budget surplus. They also recognized that the school’s sixth-grade reading-test scores were sub-par.
Lappin had somewhat more control over his school budget than other Los Angeles Unified School District principals, so he and his staff decided to use the surplus on professional development and hired teacher coaches for the sixth-grade instructors.
“Our test scores went up,” he says. “That was a successful use of money, and it was a decision made at the school level.”
Ouchi’s ideas about greater site control also appear to be gaining traction with state education leaders. As the one-time chief of staff to former Los Angeles mayor and current California Education Secretary Richard Riordan, Ouchi is a key member of Riordan’s education advisory panel.
Riordan, in fact, has publicly embraced Ouchi’s theses. In February, he announced his intent to advance a statewide measure that would vastly expand principals’ powers over their budgets and staffing while also streamlining the state’s education-financing system so that money follows students to schools rather than being allocated by central districts.
The education secretary cites Ouchi’s research into site-based budgeting as a significant influence on this thinking. “The whole school-finance system needs to be revamped so that the authority and control is at the local level, under the leadership of the principal,” says Riordan. “Leadership is the way you turn schools around.”
Ouchi and other professors involved in UCLA’s school-leadership training urge school leaders to take the idea of local control one step further.
In addition to controlling their school’s budget and making wise spending decisions with the money they're allotted, campus administrators need to think about how they can generate their own funds, says Professor Marilyn Kourilsky ’61, M.A. ’63, Ph.D. ’68.
Successful school leaders, says Kourilsky, co-director of UCLA’s Institute for the Study of Educational Entrepreneurship and founder and chief education adviser for the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leaders, need to be able to distinguish between a good idea and one that presents a genuine opportunity for the school.
Public schools can, for example, rent out space in their gymnasium or auditorium during non-school hours, she says. She cites examples in which students have brought in income for their schools by using their technological expertise to build Web sites for community businesses.
“Part of being opportunity-focused is to think of the school as an education venture,” she says.
The keys to what Kourilsky calls “intra-preneurial leadership” are straightforward: Be visionary. Be content-driven. Be innovation-focused. Be risk-oriented. Be customer-oriented.
The last component is one that Kourilsky stresses. With all of the emphasis on pushing school administrators to think like business leaders, Kourilsky and other instructors continue to underscore the importance of personal relationships. For a school, being customer-oriented is very different than for a business, says Kourilsky. “It’s not Starbucks.”
While replicating successful programs and practices is as crucial to school leaders as it is to business leaders, the approach a school leader must take should include a complete understanding of their school site’s specific needs.
Ana Ponce tried replicating the coffee sessions from her old school at her new school using the same approach and quickly learned her new school required a different method.
Ponce laughs now when recalling the somewhat awkward coffee session this past fall. Ultimately, though, she understood why parents might have initially been wary of chatting with the principal.
“They have to see first that I am open to them,” she says. “When you are a principal, it’s not just about managing an organization. It’s about relationships with the school and the people who are part of it: the staff, the teachers, the students and the families. You must very much be a part of the organization you are directing to be an effective leader.”
