The big clock in Dowan McNair-Lee's 8th grade classroom in the Stuart-Hobson Middle School is silent, but she can hear the minutes ticking away nonetheless. On this day, like any other, the clock is a constant reminder of how little time she has to prepare her students--for spring tests, and for high school and all that lies beyond it. The…

Even with nearly 50 schools shutting down at the end of this month, Chicago education officials have been barreling ahead with plans to groom a large crop of high-performing principals that they say represents the most ambitious effort the city has undertaken to upgrade its school leadership ranks. The goal, said Chicago schools CEO Barbara…

Keith Look, Shawnee High School principal, must steer his 82-year-old high school on the far west side of Louisville, Kentucky, through an aggressive, federally mandated effort to reverse a decades-long decline in student achievement that has given Shawnee the label of one of Kentucky's worst schools. He is one soldier in an army of principals…

For schools to improve in the Pittsburgh school district, it is not just the children who have to learn. Embracing the idea that strong principals are essential to academic success, top administrators have launched several initiatives based on the philosophy that school leaders need to be cultivated as carefully as students. A committee of…

Two years ago, only 150 students attended Holabird Elementary, then a K-5 school in the southeastern corner of this city. Competition from charters and from regular public schools in nearby Baltimore County had drained families from Holabird, a chronic underperformer. So when Andres A. Alonso, the chief executive officer of the Baltimore city…

Since 2000, New Leaders for New Schools has recruited and trained more than 300 principals and placed them at the helms of troubled schools in cities across the nation. But the nonprofit organization, cofounded by Jonathan Schnur, an education policy adviser in President Bill Clinton's administration, and sustained by his political savvy and…

The excesses of the modern prom often require principals to play the roles of police, fashion arbiters, and even parents. In the midst of the 2007 junior and senior prom season, school leaders attest to a mounting list of policies, regulations, and security measures they are enforcing for the year's big social event. Indeed, the prom, a…

When Erik G. Brown launched his teaching career at the Cesar Chavez Academy in East Palo Alto, California, four years ago, he was not alone. Seventy-five percent of the teachers in the 400-student middle school were new to the district, and two-thirds of those were new to the field. The school had gone through six principals in six years, and its…