Editorial: Starting at the top

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

As the Nevada Legislature debates how to improve the quality of education, it has to address the lack of experienced school principals.

A story in Monday's Las Vegas Sun by Emily Richmond reported that of the 320 principals in the Clark County School District, 75 have retired since 2004. The district has about 75 more who are closing in on retirement.

The turnover has led to a crop of inexperienced principals. In Clark County, 42 percent of the elementary school principals have been on the job for no more than three years - a rate seven times higher than the national average. At secondary schools, 48 percent of the principals are new to the job, a rate three times higher than the national average. It is not easy to find qualified administrators who want to do the job. According to the Education Commission of the States, a legislative clearinghouse, there is a nationwide shortage in part because qualified people often don't want the job.

Why? One clear reason is the headaches, such as keeping up with the No Child Left Behind Act. Instead of creating educational leaders, the law turned principals into bureaucratic paper-pushers, who monitor test score fluctuations for fear of being branded a failure to achieve what are often arbitrary standards. Another reason is pay - there are easier and more lucrative ways to earn a living.

In Clark County, there has been a policy to give administrators with 27 years experience an early retirement buyout, and that should end - the district and the state need to encourage good principals, who make students and teachers better, to stay on the job while training and developing younger ones. That can be done by increasing pay and ensuring that principals have the support, including qualified people and the resources to do the job, to ease unnecessary headaches.

Without doing so, any measure to improve the schools - especially the empowerment proposal, which gives principals and teachers more authority over their curriculums and campuses - is bound to fail.