Should Principals be teachers?

Over at the Ed Wonks, an open thread dealt with whether principals or administrators can be effective administrators without classroom experience. I posted a couple of comments in the thread. I quote from a couple of others here:

Ms. Cornelius opened the thread with the question of why have administrators with little or no teaching experience. Closing with:

I say that one should have at least 10 years of teaching experience with a normal teaching load before one should be able to oversee the educational process.

DW responds a few comments later with this piece of logic:

Here's the logic in this thread:

Axiom 1: My administrator is bad.
Axiom 2: My administrator does not have teaching experience.
Conclusion: Good administrators need teaching experience.

Wow, that is quite a jump! I can empathize with how frusturating it is to work for a bad boss. But, I've worked for horrible administrators who had 20+ years of classroom experience. And the best administrator I worked for knew very little about my day-to-day work, but she knew how to get me the help/answers I needed in order to do my job.

DW hits the nail on the head with his last sentence. Administrators are not just experienced teachers, they are problems solvers. One need not have experienced actual classroom problems to be able to solve them. Indeed, sometimes a non-teaching perspective may help by finding a solution outside of the teacher point of view. Problem solving requires creativity and understanding--one need to have direct experience to solve classroom problems.

Ms Cornelius responds again:

In the realm of asssessing the performance of and providing direction to a teacher, principals are supposed to be able to give teachers accurate and reasonable assessments, feedback, and concrete suggestions. Can't do it if you've never done it. It comes from experience and talent and sometimes luck. The administrators with all theory and no experience (or no recent experience) have usually exhibited the same sagacity of the three blind men describing the elephant. (emphasis added)

Again, I ask the question why? What is so vital about a decade's worth classroom experience that is needed to be an effective administrator? I see the administrator of a school as a leader (one who is effective I hope, but there are bad leaders out there). That leader needs to have a wide range of experience, but also a vision and a clear understanding of the role of each of the parts of the organization in order to achieve the goal of the organization. But the leader need not be an expert or even have experience in all the areas they must oversee. They do of course need to know how each piece of the puzzle relates to the other pieces and to the overall mission.

But if we hold to the logic being pushed by Ms. Cornelius, that a principal must have teaching experience, where do we draw the line. By her logic, the principal would have to have:

1. Classroom experience at least a decade's worth.
2. Facilities maintenance expereience since the principal has to oversee custodial staff.
3. Library management experience.
4. Large cafeteria food prep experience.
5. Musical experience for instruments and vocals.
6. Personnel management experience.
7. Experience coaching/playing every sport supported by the school.
8. Financial management experience.
9. Guidance Counselor experience.
10. Program management and evaluation.

Those are just the topics off the top of my head. In short, taking Ms. Cornelius logic to its fair conclusion, the only people who could qualify to be a principal would be so close to their death bed as to be useless!

Looking outside of the educational world we can find hundreds of examples of effective leadership without direct experience in the various parts of their responsibility.

The CEO of a corporation need not know the details of how their product is manufactured, marketed, or shipped. They don't need to experts in regulatory law as it applies to their busienss, accounting rules, human resources management. They need to know generalities and know where to get details. The CEO is a leader who must have a vision for the future and a plan to get their. The CEO's mission is to further the interests of the company and the stockholders. You don't need to be expert in everything to do that.

What if we looked at the military? A general is certainly a leader. But by Ms. Cornelius's logic, to be an effective general, the general would have to

1. Know how to use and maintain infantry weapons. I could assume they should know how to maintain a pistol and rifle for field use.
2. Know how to use and maintain all the vehicles like tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, HUMVEES.
3. Know how to fly all the aircraft in use by the military.
4. Know about the care and feeding of the soldiers in his command
5. Know all about the details of communcations, sensors and other electroncis.
etc.

As you can see, no general officer knows all of this. That is why they are called general officers. They know how to marshall their resources and deploy them in such a manner as to achive the military goal set out for them.

In the corporate and military worlds, the senior leaders have general knowledge and a staff of experts to conduct various aspects of the organizations mission.

However, when we look at education, there seems to be some sort of mental block among some teachers that to be a good administrator you have to have teaching experience. An administrator has so many things to do that they must rely on experts--the teachers, librarians, facilities staff, accountants, cafeteria workers, etc. to manage the day to day operations. The administrator must, like the CEO or the military general, marshall and deploy those resources at her command to achieve a goal--the education of children.