What does it really take to turn around low-performing schools? Many things are important: good teachers, good curriculum, adequate resources, best practices. But pulling them all together must be strong leadership. University of Illinois-Chicago researchers found principals who had succeeded where others had failed and asked them to share their secrets. With Fry Foundation funding, the University uses these ideas, built on successful practice, in an innovative program of training, networking, and coaching to create a new generation of principals ready to transform failing schools.

Chicago has been striving to improve its schools for the last two decades, and Peter Martinez has been part of it all. As a community organizer, he fought to change state law to make Chicago schools more accountable. As a foundation leader, he funded a whole range of school improvement strategies. "It became incontrovertibly clear," he says, "that no matter how many outside resources you bring into a school to help it turn around, if the principal is not knowledgeable and highly motivated, those resources just could not take root in that school."

Chicago Public Schools leaders have come to the same conclusion. Having launched an ambitious initiative to improve high schools, CPS realized that, amid all the good ideas and resources, a critical ingredient was often missing: a principal capable of transforming organizational culture and instructional practices to bring about change. The district turned its attention to training strong principals. One of its key partners is the University of Illinois-Chicago (UIC) College of Education, where Dr. Steve Tozer and Peter Martinez co-founded the Transformational Urban Principal Preparation Program.

The University offers an innovative principal training program that draws on the real world experience of successful schools. Martinez and his colleagues interviewed Chicago principals from mostly poor, mostly minority schools where students excel. The University drew on their ideas to create a new training curriculum that stresses key strategies for school turnaround, including building a culture of high expectations, creating a strong leadership team, and using data to improve performance. They invited the principals, several of whom were retiring, to join their team as coaches and mentors.

The program takes advantage of a critical situation: over 170 Chicago public schools had principal vacancies in the last school year, and another 200 new vacancies are projected over the next two years. That massive generational turnover creates a major opportunity, says Martinez: "The more principals we get in the system who are highly qualified and highly motivated to turn schools around, the more likely it is that change will happen."

Begun in 2003, UIC's four-year doctoral program currently has 74 enrollees, all selected for their commitment to school change. "That's something you can't teach," says Martinez. Students begin with coursework, then move into a paid in-school practicum with a mentor principal, and then into their own schools. Currently 59 members of the program are serving as either principals, assistant principals, or district administrators.

"Our principals start out by being very strategic," says Martinez. "They use research based frameworks to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their school, set up systems to collect data, get people together to reflect on what they see, decide what to do about it, then track what they are doing and how it's working." A coach, drawn from the ranks of principals experienced with turning around failing schools, meets with the new principals weekly to help them devise their own turnaround strategies and keep them on course.

The UIC program posts school data on its Web site and teaches principals to examine it to track what is really going on in specific schools. The principals create their own school leadership teams and work together to develop targeted strategies, based on the data, for improvement. For example, schools usually try broad-brush approaches to boost attendance; what works better is identifying what kinds of students are most often truant, understanding the circumstances that encourage or cause truancy, and targeting efforts to those specific circumstances. Similarly, grade-level reading and math scores tell only so much; it is critical to identify which students are having trouble in which subject areas and to develop strategies to support different kinds of learners. "If you can disaggregate the data, that's the beginning of telling you where to concentrate," says Martinez. "And then you have to decide what are the key indicators that are going to tell you whether you're doing the right things, and keep refining that all the time."

Last year Peggy Korellis, the UIC principal of Team Englewood High School, brought her entire freshman class and over 200 of their parents to visit the University of Illinois-Chicago, meet with students and faculty, check out the dorms, and hear firsthand what it takes to go to a good college. This year the principals of Power House High School and the UNO charter school did the same thing at different colleges, and others are planning to make similar visits in the future. The visits help fulfill one of UIC's key school improvement principles: establishing a culture of high expectations, for both the students and their school.

Turning around a school is hard work and can draw opposition from people who are reluctant to change. That is why coaching, networking with other principals, building strong school leadership teams, and staying on top of the data are all so important: they give the principals the information and support they need to stay on course toward creating genuinely successful schools.