A principal from Puyallup, Wash., has taken up residence in the U.S. Department of Education for the year.
Linda Quinn, from Puyallup High School, is the fourth principal-in-residence at the department, which started the program in 1993.
She will spend much of the school year focused on issues of technology and the changing role of school leadership.
“I think there’s been somewhat of a de-emphasis on the role of the principal in the last five to seven years, as we’ve thought about things like shared decisionmaking and site-based councils and teacher empowerment,” Ms. Quinn said in a recent interview. “Those are wonderful things, but experience is beginning to suggest that rather than replacing the principal, those changes are really going to require a principal with a different set of skills.”
She can be reached at the Education Department at (202) 205-7848 or by e-mail at linda_quinn@ed.gov.
A national organization dedicated to improving school leadership has moved its day-to-day operations from the Washington area to the college of education at the University of Missouri at Columbia.
The National Policy Board for Educational Administration unanimously approved the move at its quarterly meeting this past summer. The retirement of Scott Thomson as executive secretary prompted the relocation.
The move consolidates the university’s prominence in the field of educational leadership. This fall, the University Council for Educational Administration--a consortium of 54 research universities that have doctoral programs in the field--also relocated to Missouri from Pennsylvania State University.
Under the new setup, Patrick B. Forsyth, an associate professor of education and the executive director of the consortium, will also serve as the policy board’s corporate secretary.
One of the board’s new initiatives will be to form a “policy circle"--a cluster of university-based policy centers that will serve as the research arm for the board and help it study emerging trends. Bruce A. Jones, a professor of education who was formerly at the University of Pittsburgh, will coordinate that effort.
The full text of a new report from the Department of Education, “The Role of Leadership in Sustaining School Reform: Voices From the Field,” is available in the department’s on-line library at: http://www.ed.gov/pubs/Leadership.
– LYNN OLSON lolson@epe.org
