Torts scholar and Dean Bill Prosser recruited me for my first law school professorship at the University of California in 1960. The job of the dean, he once told me, is to tend to those things that even the janitor refuses to do. A good year was a respectable football season, buses that ran on time, no deaths from ptomaine poisoning and a leak-proof roof. Public officials from President George W. Bush to Gov. Tom Vilsack to our local School Board want schools that are data driven. Schools that regularly report progress toward planned academic goals.
Effective schools have effective instructional leadership.
Principals are perfunctory, says Walden University s Irving Buchen. The only leadership that will make a difference is that of teachers. Doctors have nurses. Lawyers have paralegals. The principal in the instructional leadership model would be a principal teacher , a mentor, an innovative and inspirational model.