The tools of school reform need leaders to put them to use, he said. He was to speak at a daylong National Conference on School Leadership sponsored by the nonprofit Wallace-Reader's Digest Funds, which promote education. There is constant demand for people to run the nation's more than 125,000 public schools, and a turnover of at least 40 percent is forecast for the nation's principals in the next 10 years. The task is not simply to cultivate a new generation of administrators, but to find candidates who want the job.
Many teachers return to graduate school to boost their qualifications and salaries.
They end up with licenses to work as principals, but never do. Riley's speech noted some of these issues. He lauded efforts to recruit leaders from outside education, and a North Carolina scholarship-loan program where newly minted principals pay off their debt by serving as a principal or assistant principal in a public school. He spoke of the School Leadership Institute. Proposed in the federal education budget now before Congress, the institute would create 20 state or regional centers to train 10,000 school administrators.