In this discussion, we focus on the topic of rhetoric and symbols of urban principal accountability in the United States. Over the past decade, urban district administrators have initiated principal accountability systems as a strategy for effecting change in schools (Ouchi, 2003, 2009; Shipps & White, 2009). Through media-disseminated rhetoric and symbols attendant to these policy actions, city school district and reform leaders have positioned principals as fundamentally important to and ultimately responsible for school improvement and student achievement. The rhetoric and symbols of urban principal accountability appear in various media forms, particularly news reports, Web pages, press releases, and organizational documents. These media forms serve as the basis of our exploration and analysis.

We begin with a relevant media scenario: A national television news report (Merrow, 2007) featuring Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools Michelle Rhee illustrates the current rhetoric and symbols of urban principal accountability. (District of Columbia and New York City schools refer to their district chiefs as “chancellor” instead of “superintendent,” but the organizational role is equivalent.) As the news report began, the reporter explained that Chancellor Rhee had met one-on-one with all 156 principals in the system at the start of the year. This fact symbolized the important role principals would come to play in her reform efforts. The camera view then focused on Chancellor Rhee as she stated (in a professional, matter-of-fact tone) to a person who was off camera, “No, I am terminating your principalship now” (Merrow, p. 1). Chancellor Rhee’s willingness to be filmed while dismissing a principal may have signified a “get-tough” approach to improving her district, school-by-school and leader-by-leader. Similarly, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (2007) may have intended to reflect a no-compromises educational leadership stance when, in a State of the City Address, he explained:

Each school will receive a grade, from “A” to “F,” on its year-to-year progress in helping students advance. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to hold a principal’s feet to the fire than arming mom and dad with the facts about how well or poorly their children’s school is performing. (pp. 3-4)

American urban school district and reform leaders, such as Chancellor Rhee and Mayor Bloomberg, are utilizing principal-centered rhetoric and symbols worthy of scholarly attention and analysis. Our concern for this issue springs from our personal histories and research interests. The first author served as a public high school principal in a major urban city as district leaders utilized media outlets to consistently designate principals as the crucial elements in their efforts to improve the school system. Both authors share an academic interest in examining the roles that ritual, symbols, media, and politics play in the culture of schooling.

For this inquiry, we ask two questions: Through media-disseminated rhetoric and symbols, how have urban school district and reform leaders portrayed principals? And, what political effects may result from the sustained media emphasis on urban principal accountability? We respond to the first question in the results section and the second in the discussion section. This study is exploratory in nature and our discourse in regards to political nuances and effects is necessarily speculative. We hope our writing will help generate further dialogue about how and why urban school district and reform leaders hold principals publicly accountable for school success.

For over a decade now, scholars have been examining the roles of rhetoric and symbols in educational leadership and policy. In their historical analysis of public school reform in the U.S., Tyack and Cuban (1995) described the “rhetoric of reform” as “a dramatic exchange in a persistent theater of aspiration and anxiety” (p. 42). Political scientist Edelman (1988) defined symbol as “that facet of experiencing the material world that gives it a specific meaning” (p. 8). In essence, symbols reflect underlying political values and themes that actors (e.g., superintendents) are hoping to present to a broader audience. Drawing upon Edelman’s concepts, Smith, Miller-Kahn, Heinecke, and Jarvis (2004) and Anderson (2007), among other researchers, have examined how symbolic language and actions contribute to a media-created “political spectacle” that can simplify or distort complex policy issues like school accountability. Bolman and Deal (2008) have established that organizations such as schools are partly characterized by their rituals and symbols. From their perspective, rituals give structure and meaning to daily organizational life and symbols are created to enhance clarity and order. Our analysis draws upon these educational ideas and opens up a new avenue of inquiry in its attention to the rhetoric and symbols of urban principal accountability.

Further, our line of analysis is relevant to the body of literature concerning school politics and accountability. Influential works have described the political role principals and superintendents play in responding to multiple constituency actors, competing for scarce resources, and assigning or receiving blame for negative organizational developments (Black & English, 2001; Cuban, 1988; Wolcott, 1973). Cooper, Cibulka, and Fusarelli (2008) explored how the changing nature of educational politics affects schooling. Ouchi (2003, 2009) investigated major urban districts where individual principals received broader autonomy, greater budgetary control, and increased performance accountability. Shipps and White (2009) examined how new accountability systems in New York City may be affecting the political approaches of principals. We augment the existing literature by examining district and reform leader rhetoric and symbols in regards to the urban school principalship and by aiming to illuminate how urban school districts operate as political terrains.

For this study involving the examination of rhetoric and symbols in publicly accessible media, we collected and analyzed relevant news reports, Web pages, press releases, and organizational documents. We initiated this exploration in early 2009 by conducting a broad Internet search for media pertaining to urban school districts. Using Internet search engines such as Google and databases such as Lexis-NexisAcademic, we retrieved news media reports from national outlets and a broad range of U.S. cities. We also accessed district and organizational Web sites for further materials related to our subject. We eventually gathered over 100 items that constituted more than 400 total printed pages. Similar to the document analysis approach that Tyack and Cuban (1995) and Smith et al. (2004) utilized, we independently and together closely examined the evidence collected to gain insight into reform rhetoric and political symbols. Through our analysis of the compiled documents, we established interpretive coherence and identified two primary themes and each of the themes is discussed.

With reference to media-disseminated rhetoric and symbols, we asked how urban school district and reform leaders have portrayed principals. After examining the evidence collected, we identified a two-part rhetorical and symbolic message that emanated from urban school district and reform leaders: principals are fundamentally important to and ultimately accountable for school improvement and student achievement.

From our examination of the evidence collected, we found that urban school district and reform leaders convey, through rhetoric and symbols, the message that principals are fundamentally important to and ultimately responsible for school improvement and student achievement. In our second research question, we asked what political effects the sustained media emphasis on urban principal accountability may generate. We know from existing literature that politics is potent in educational systems (Cooper, Cibulka, & Fusarelli, 2008) and in the symbolic work of organizational leaders (Bolman & Deal, 2008). Principals, the primary focus of urban accountability initiatives, occupy a precarious position at the nexus of competing political interests (Black & English, 2001; Cuban, 1988; Wolcott, 1973). Given this context and our findings from the evidence analyzed, we speculate that the rhetoric and symbols of urban principal accountability may be associated with two political effects in particular.

One, publicly positioning principals as important to and responsible for school success aligns with current reform literature. Ouchi (2009), for instance, proposes that systemic reform in school districts is possible if individual principals are given autonomy to manage individual schools as they see fit and if they are held accountable for academic results. The logic behind this thinking is that effective individual leaders will improve individual schools, affording positive changes to an entire district. However, urban district leaders can also realize short-term political benefits by holding principals publicly accountable. If principals are primarily responsible for school success, then the principal, not the mayor or district leader, is mainly responsible for school failure. This political pivot—placing the symbolic onus of accountability on the shoulders of individual site-based principals—may serve as a means for redirecting pressures away from district headquarters and city hall and toward the schoolhouse door and especially the principal’s office.

Two, news accounts of a district’s principal turnover rates and forced removals may signify a district leader’s efforts to foment deep-reaching, fundamental change in their system. Media reports specifying substantial numbers of principal departures and news images of district leaders terminating principals offer a symbol of decisive action: Here is a “get tough” leader doing whatever is deemed necessary to help children succeed at school. At the very least, district leaders’ “feet to the fire” rhetorical approach delivers an unmistakable message to principals: Get the desired school results or you will be next to face removal. Even if this type of action is interpreted as a form of public shaming or blame-shifting, the broader public may embrace it as a necessary step for improving urban schools, especially given the widespread belief that principals ultimately determine school success (and failure).

Schools are the institutions expected to address deep-seated educational and social ills, from poor academic performance to violence to teenage pregnancy (Cuban & Usdan, 2002). Principals are the actors most likely to be held accountable for whether schools successfully attend to these difficult issues. Accordingly, in many major cities across the country, a message is being repeated, rhetorically as well as symbolically: Principals are fundamentally important to and ultimately responsible for school improvement and student achievement.

Under this prevailing logic, site-based principals are deemed accountable for a host of complex student challenges. The New York Times, for example, noted high rates of student absenteeism in some New York City schools and explained, “City officials said the responsibility for absenteeism lies chiefly with school principals, who are required by the state to submit attendance plans” (Medina, 2008, p. 2). In this instance, city officials may have symbolically distanced the Mayor from the student absentee issue, emphasizing it was a school-based problem, not a multifaceted economic, social, and cultural concern. The Times article quoted the Deputy Mayor, who explained, “You are going to have pockets of students and pockets of schools that have high rates of absence, and we can’t be afraid to go after that. Those principals will be held accountable for that” (Ibid.). The Deputy Mayor’s willingness to hold principals publicly accountable for student absenteeism may have signified city leaders’ willingness to improve schools and “fix” social problems no matter the tough actions required. By extension, such examples of the rhetoric and politics of urban principal accountability help ensure that principals are consistently positioned as ultimately responsible for solving vexing problems related to schools and students.

Urban school principal accountability is an attractive reform strategy with significant potential advantages. Notably, the demand for improved performance from principals may compel them to find new ways to elicit better results from staff and students (Ouchi, 2009). Moreover, given that individual schools are the standard unit for measuring academic performance under NCLB-related state accountability systems, it seems entirely appropriate that school district and reform leaders would focus on site-based leadership as a lynchpin for school improvement. Important questions regarding urban principal accountability remain, however. For instance, is putting principals’ “feet to the fire” through public rhetoric and symbols creating an uninviting image of the position, which may cause potentially good candidates to forgo pursuing the principalship? Also, can urban school district and reform leaders achieve an effective balance between directing tough talk and tough actions toward principals and providing encouragement, support, and stability principals need in order to effect enduring change? These are only some of the questions that we hope our study will inspire readers to consider and perhaps address in future writings.

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