Photo: Kate Samp for Strategies for Children

Instructional leadership is a critical component of a successful education system, and two recent publications look at the role of the elementary school principal in early childhood. Policy analyst Sara Mead looks at ways to improve principals’ support of early education and the primary grades in a recent brief from the Foundation for Child Development. And the National Association of Elementary School Principals devotes the May-June issue of its Principal magazine to early childhood. I’ll write about Mead’s brief today and Principal magazine in my next post.

“Educational improvement strategies that focus on the early years – preventing children from falling behind in the first place – have a much better chance of long-term success than those that emphasize remediation later on,” Mead writes in “PreK-3^rd: Principals as Crucial Instructional Leaders.” “But in an era of test-based accountability, principals face pervasive systemic incentives to direct resources and energy away from the early grades and into later, tested grades.”

Mead also notes that principal preparation programs are often weak in building the foundation for instructional leadership, particularly for pre-kindergarten and the early grades. States often do not require elementary school principals to be trained in child development and early education.

An exception, Mead notes, is Illinois, which in 2010 enacted legislation (PA 96-0903) that “made Illinois the first state to require principal preparation programs to fully integrate early childhood-related content by 2014.” Mead also notes the Cambridge-based CAYL Institute’s Principals Fellowship in Early Care and Education as another significant initiative to bolster elementary school principals’ understanding of early childhood.

Mead lists several ingredients of successful PreK-3^rd instructional leadership, including creating a PreK-3^rd culture that views the early years as “fundamental parts of the school’s mission” and “aligns standards, sequenced curriculum, instruction and assessments.” Effective principals, she writes, also emphasize effective teaching in all grades that includes assessment “even in the early grades” and adjustments in instruction based on these assessments.