If school improvement programs are to have efficacy, teachers must want to use them. This implies the school should be the basic unit of decision on progam purchases. This will only happen when schools are autonomous, and school autonomy implies school-centered managment. And so effective school principals become important to the industry's future.

In their discussion of a new Fordham/AIR report on public school principals, Finn and Petrilli convey the unsurprising and not exactly new finding that most are not all that thrilled about the prospect of real managerial autonomy.  The way they tell it, no self-respecting principal could take the job unless he or she lowered their expectations.

As Stig Leschly, a young internet entrepreneur who turned his talents to public education, said once to your editor: "Every system does what is was designed to do, and well. The trick is figuring out what it was designed to do." The public school system has been designed to diffuse accountability to the point where no one can be held responsible. The way your editor has observed it, the public school system aims to discourage those with a sense of entrepreneurship from joining up, eliminate most of those who somehow manage to get in, but retain just enough to be able to point to that "island of excellence and its dynamic leader" when the need arises to prove "all public schools could be great if only the system had more money." In bureacratic political analysis the phenomemon of retaining a few troublemakers, and even guilding their cages, is called "domesticated dissent." The school system does this very well.

Indeed, the reason we hear such cries of agony from every corner of the system about No Child Left Behind is that the law has fixed responsibility for student performance with the school. If the law holds in anything close to its present form during reauthorization, it will crystaliyze a pattern of accountability no one in the system wants. Eventually that will result in a different kind of school leader, indeed a different kind of leadership throught k-12. Still, the first "fall guys" will be from the principal class in which the system has spent a century developing a trained incapacity for initiative. It is not a pretty sight.

The report is worth reading for a sense of the kind of client most principals are likely to be.

In any case, what is truly welcome about Finn's and Petrilli's discussion is their recognition that the challenge of turning k-12's middle management into a new entrepreneurial class is daunting, not subject to change overnight, and - most surprising - worth the long-term struggle. Petrilli's remarks on NCLB and Finn's tendency to turn sour on just about every reform he's seen over his long carreer (charters schools being the exception, where his Fordham Foundation has done truly heavy lifting as an authorizer), had your editor wondering if they subscribed to a different version of "when the going gets tough, the tough get going." As in "....as far away from the problem as possible," which is just another way to describe philanthropy's penchant for "trend surfing."  Here they have declared themselves ready for the tough slog. Bravo.

__________________________________

Most disinterested analysts agreed that principals should be in charge of key school functions, operations, and decisions, particularly with regard to personnel, curriculum, and budget. But to what extent do principals themselves agree that they should have this authority? And to what extent do they actually possess it? If not, why not?....

Nobody, to our knowledge, had asked those questions. So we did. We joined with a research team at the American Institutes for Research led by Dr. Steven Adamowski (former Cincinnati Superintendent, university professor, analyst, now superintendent of schools in Hartford) to sit down with a decent-sized population of principals for extended interviews. Thus was born a new Fordham/AIR report, The Autonomy Gap, which looks at--and begins to answer--some key questions about school leadership....

Some of their results are no surprise. Principals working in the traditional public education system describe themselves as possessing scant authority over functions that they themselves regard as critical to raising student achievement, especially in the domain of school staffing. Steve terms this distance between the authority they need and the authority they have ''the autonomy gap.''....

But Adamowski and company also gleaned new insights that seem to us even more disturbing. Most important: despite having their hands tied with respect to critical school-leadership decisions, most district principals appear content with, or resigned to, the meager authority they possess.... Yes, they would welcome greater control--especially over personnel; particularly hiring, firing, and transferring teachers--but they don't demand it. They don't expect it....

Yes, it's understandable, deserving of empathy not criticism. How could one rise from bed in the morning and head off to a long, hard day's work if one were constantly frustrated by the terms of that job? Better to adjust one's expectations. If one cannot adjust, better to enter a different line of work.

Understandable from the principal's standpoint, yes, but surely not good for education reform. Apple founder and cultural icon Steve Jobs recently asked, ''What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in, they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?'' Part of his answer seems to be: most public-school principals.

Should we abandon hope for finding principals who yearn to be hard-charging executives, marshalling all of their schools' resources to increase pupil achievement, and knocking down all barriers in their way? Not yet. We may be seeing a version of the classic chicken-egg paradox. Which comes first: greater authority for principals or principals who demand greater authority?....

If districts want to tap the energy and experience of effective leaders in education and beyond--and draw talented new individuals into school leadership roles--they could embrace a decentralized approach, in essence treating every school like a charter school. Las Vegas and New York City, for example, have established ''empowerment zones'' in which principals enjoy substantially greater autonomy....

But it's genuinely hard for school districts to transition from command-and-control to autonomy-in-return-for-accountability. Such a shift means doing battle with meddlesome states, powerful unions, and central-office fiefdoms. It means paying principals more and micromanaging them less. Not an easy shift, but one worth making. If leadership is as important a factor in school success as research indicates and as just about everyone acknowledges, and if great leaders demand (and need) true authority, taking this difficult step will justify the effort. It's the best way to close the autonomy gap--and thus a key to closing the achievement gap as well.

Chester E. Finn Jr, and Michael J. Petrilli. The Education Gadfly, April 12.