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### Chapter 5. Principals' Goals, Influence, and Career Plans

This chapter focuses on three separate issues that are important in understanding the principal's place in the work environments of school and district. The first of these, educational goals, provides insight into the extent to which a principal has a sense of direction and articulates that direction. The second, influence, relates to the important issue of the principal's control over critical factors that affect the school's performance. The third, plans to continue as a principal, reflects on job satisfaction, self-efficacy, and leadership continuity, all factors that affect a principal's performance and effectiveness.
The articulation of goals for schools and, especially, the ability to mobilize resources to obtain the goals are important attributes of the effective school principal (Bookbinder, 1992). The ability to identify both short- and long-term goals is one of the distinguishing elements between the �beacons of brilliance� and �potholes of pestilence� described by Goldhammer and his colleagues' (1971) study of principals. Typically, goals are described as the instructional leader's �vision�; and effective school leaders are said to have distinct, active, ambitious, and performance-oriented visions. Leithwood and Montgomery (1982) categorized the goals of effective principals in terms of three basic orientations�toward students, teachers, and the larger school district�with primacy assigned to �the achievement and happiness of students� (p. 320). As Finn (1987, p. 21) noted, effective school leaders are �intellectually and emotionally committed to meeting challenges, producing achievements, and uniting the school in shared dedication to excellence� through their goals.
�Producing achievements,� however, requires that principals not only set meaningful goals, but that they have the influence to mobilize resources and make changes that will address their goals. Global questions about school effectiveness are essentially meaningless without further specification of the goals desired and the approaches that can be used to accomplish the goals. Thus, it is critical to assess the goals of school administrators and to have an understanding of the influence school leaders have in areas critical to accomplishing their goals.
Principals' career plans have broad implications for policy makers and planners, as well as great potential impact on day-to-day school operations. Estimates of the magnitude of the turnover vary, but most who have studied the issue agree that over half of the nation's public school principals will depart in the 1990s (Miller, 1987; National Association for Elementary School Principals, 1990; Doud, 1989). This numbers over 39,000 principals who must be replaced by new, trained administrators. Examining school administration as a career becomes important for understanding, to the extent possible, the reasons for continuation or departure. This information may be useful in reducing exiting and in improving the chances that the best candidates are recruited, hired, and sustained.
The survey method limits the depth with which the Schools and Staffing Survey can address principals' goals and influence, and many questions of interest in these areas cannot be posed in a structured format. For example, close-ended questions limit the amount of detail that can be obtained about specific local goals and limit the information that can be obtained about principals' influence directly in relation to achieving those specific goals. The survey responses, however, do provide some broad information about general goals principals view as important and their perceptions of their influence in areas related to these goals. Schools and Staffing Survey provides more complete information about principals' plans for continuing their careers as principals, which can be viewed in relation to school and principal characteristics. The following sections address these issues.
Principals' Educational Goals
Schools and Staffing Survey asks principals to choose the three educational goals they consider most important from a list of eight. The lists for the public and private principal questionnaires included the following seven items:
- building basic literacy skills (reading, math, writing, speaking);
encouraging academic excellence;

promoting occupational or vocational skills;

promoting good work habits and self-discipline;

promoting personal growth (self-esteem, self-knowledge, etc.);

promoting human relations skills; and

promoting specific moral values.

The public principal questionniare also included the following eighth item: promoting multicultural awareness or understanding. For private principals the eighth item was as follows: fostering religious or spiritual development.
Figure 11 shows, for 1993-94, the percentage of public and private principals who rated each educational goal as first, second, or third most important. Public school principals most often selected goals related to academic performance or to personal development that supports academic performance. Specifically, 72 percent of public school principals selected building basic literacy skills as an important goal in their school, 63 percent selected encouraging academic excellence, and 58 percent selected promoting good work habits and self-discipline. Compared to those three goals, they selected goals regarding vocational skills (15 percent), moral values (6 percent), or multicultural awareness (11 percent) less frequently.