We can't hire our way out of the achievement gap: A Conversation with Principals
- Dr. Mike Brown
- 3 days ago
- 8 min read
As Principal, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some amazing teachers who, in daily practice, remind us of what excellence in instruction looks like. While we, on occasion, have the opportunity to celebrate a few of these stand-out educators state-wide by awarding them a “Teacher of the Year” award, the truth is that very few come to us like this. More often, the excellence we are “hoping” for is something we must intentionally coach, consistently develop, and routinely progress monitor in all of our teachers every school year.
This reality means we have our work cut out for us as principals and teachers alike. According to NAEP’s 2024 national assessment data, only 28% of 8th graders are mastering grade-level standards in Math and 30% in ELA. Alabama educators and students have the potential to stand among the nation’s leaders in student achievement if schools move beyond isolated “islands of success” and commit to a unified effort to strengthen instruction in every classroom. When principals and their focused, aligned leadership teams lead with clarity and shared purpose, high-quality teaching becomes the norm across the entire building, not the exception.
Any honest conversation about teacher quality and school effectiveness, however, must begin with a sincere acknowledgment of the brilliance and heart-led commitment teachers in Alabama and across the country demonstrate every day. I’m sure that both you, as the reader, and I, as the writer of this article, show up as staunch teacher advocates and believers that our country needs to elevate the profile, prestige, and pay of our teachers, representative of the life-changing work they do. They work on average 53 hours per week despite a 26.4% pay gap between themselves and their peers with similar education levels and degrees, a gap that has more than quadrupled in the last 30 years, according to a 2023 study published by The Economic Policy Institute. Very few professions require so much for so little in compensation. Teaching is severely underinvested, and far from the “light lift’ job others imagine it to be. At the same time, our righteous advocacy does not absolve us from honesty about instructional quality or our responsibility as leaders to improve it.
Over the course of 25 years in school buildings, I’ve observed enough classrooms to recognize what educators often refer to as “bad teaching.” But it’s often not what we think. Bad teaching most often is rarely expressed through student mistreatment but rather poor lesson preparation and low expectations for student intellect and capacity. We’ve all seen it. Heavy teacher talk with very little student discourse, teachers literally “talking through” what should be independent practice and student work time, meandering lessons with minimal alignment between academic tasks and the day’s standard and objectives, and lessons concluding without clear, show-what-you know assessments or exit tickets to accurately gauge student mastery…a quiet formula for underperformance. Yep, we’ve all seen it. Heck, I’ve done it. And I was honestly starting to see a few examples of this in my building as a leader.
We’re going to be transparent for a moment, for we are among leaders. When we see 20% and 30% proficiency in school buildings, we are usually looking at what educators often refer to as “islands of success. Most of our lower performing schools rely on hiring 3-4 “teacher of the year” caliber educators to create a handful of higher performing classrooms and spread them around the building in strategic testing grades to excel on the ACAP; hoping to buffer the school scores to make up for the chronic underperformance we may be experiencing throughout the building. These are the classrooms that you and I as school leaders show off when influential stakeholders visit the building.
On these islands of success, instruction looks amazing. We see focused teachers, driven to be their personal best, taking advantage of every opportunity to learn more, and seemingly refusing to accept less than each student’s best. But for the other classrooms on the hall and for many different reasons, this is not necessarily the case.
We simply keep those doors closed and celebrate the few bright spots in the building. To be honest, we may even pretend that we had a hand in creating those bright spots. But if those bright spots were truly our doing, we have to ask ourselves, “why have we not been able to create more”.
The reality is that most teachers do not arrive as rock stars…and that is completely understandable. Teaching adolescents, navigating the colorful personalities they bring, and mastering the rigor of effective instructional practice all take time and a ton of support. Many educators enter the building for summer PD each year, just as we did as teachers, still developing fluency with curriculum models, lesson internalization, and the day-to-day demands of high-quality instruction. Even deeper, few come prepared for their practice to be closely observed, examined, and pushed through ongoing feedback, especially when that feedback is frequent and high-stakes. And despite our best intentions as principals, studies show that we spend a surprisingly small portion of our time supporting our teachers in these instructional matters. One analysis finds that only about 8% of a principal’s time is spent in classrooms, and broader research shows that just 28% of our days have been devoted to any tasks directly related to teaching and learning at all. So let’s commit to being the instructional leaders our teachers and students need.
As hiring managers, we can and should celebrate when a rock star teacher comes our way, but that is rare. Though we may take credit for hiring them and maybe even finding them, rarely can we take credit for developing them. And that is our gap as Principals to close.
What teachers do bring is potential, commitment, and a willingness to grow when they are met with support through coaching, a culture of high expectations, and a crystal-clear understanding of quality instruction. Our role as leaders is not to judge readiness, but to create the conditions that allow great teaching to happen.
And because such ready-for-impact teachers are rare, we, as Principals, cannot rely solely on blue-chip recruitment to drive building-wide performance. We cannot hire our way out of the achievement gap. We need to coach our way to school-wide academic excellence and cultivate the talent in front of us.
Principals, this is where our official transition from Building Manager to Instructional Leader begins!
With the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) showing a nearly 45% decline in teacher prep program enrollees and a 10-year trend of fewer program completers resulting in 300,000 fewer ready day 1 educators in the class, we must mount a powerful in-building academic response.
The research offers us as practitioners encouraging news, findings show that Teachers are the most impactful school contributor to student improvement
And what about our impact as Principals? Studies find that leadership is second only to teaching among school-based factors to advancing student learning
Therefore, our most effective and sustainable strategy for improving academic achievement and moving from growth to proficiency is not to necessarily hire rock stars, but to develop them!
In an increasingly complex educational landscape, our solution remains simple: Focus on classroom instruction and make teacher development our highest priority.
“Leading learning should become the primary focus of a principal’s job, time, and effort”, according to Vanderbilt’s Jason Grissom4. The reality is that when we as Principals make this optional, we unknowingly signal to staff and students that achievement, too, is optional.
Why does this matter so deeply? Because without frequent, ongoing, high-quality feedback, research shows that teachers tend to plateau in effectiveness by their third or fourth year in the classroom. Not coincidentally, this plateau aligns with the timeline for earning tenure and a sharp decrease in observations and coaching cycles. There is a persistent myth in education that teacher learning happens primarily in years one through three, and that experience alone carries educators toward “effective” or “highly effective” practice. But it is just that…a myth.
While it is true that a significant portion of teacher learning occurs early in a career, the reality is also that learning dramatically slows over the remaining 25+ years in the field, and that’s not encouraging. Because we truly believe learning is a lifelong endeavor, we should also embrace that teachers who can grow rapidly in their first three years are capable of compounding that growth through effective PD and coaching year after year. Adult learning slows not because our educator capacity diminishes, but because we unintentionally deprioritize it. When this happens, we both, teachers and leaders, settle into patterns, and student learning stagnates.
In fully embracing our roles as Instructional leaders committed to teacher development and Student Achievement, here is our Call To Action.
Call 1: Make Professional Development Weekly, Targeted, and Practice-Based
Effective professional development is not a one-time theatrical event but is a continuous cycle of learning. Weekly PD must be grounded in what we as leaders are actually seeing in classrooms, focusing on patterns of practice rather than isolated moments. Our PDs should be authentic, instructional, and include practice. We would never send a team onto the field without practice, yet we do this daily with teachers. Let’s not practice until we get it right, let’s practice until we can’t get it wrong.
Call 2: Routinize Weekly or Biweekly Classroom Observations
Principals, I know we’re really busy, but if we don’t see instruction, we can’t improve it. I know that when observations pick up randomly, teachers get nervous. But when teachers feel uneasy about observations, it simply means we haven’t been there enough. Work with teachers and create a feedback-rich adult culture where classroom visits are not about evaluation but about support. Furthermore, make open-door learning the norm, not the exception. And leave the long rubrics behind. Let’s instead focus on real practice and small, bite-sized adjustments that immediately improve our students’ learning experience.
Call 3: Run Coaching Cycles That Close Learning Loops
Our coaching cycle should not end with feedback. They should end with improvement. Effective coaching includes pre-observation planning, real-time observation, timely feedback, modeling when needed, and follow-up observation to confirm growth. Therefore, our loop must close with internalized teacher moves and measurable change, not a checked box. Our coaching is most effective when it results in improved instructional delivery from our teachers the next time students walk into the room.
Call 4: Lead Teacher Development from the Top
If our teacher development is the engine of student achievement, then instructional leadership is not simply one of our responsibilities; it is the responsibility. We as Principals should model this priority by spending time in classrooms, evaluating our meetings by their impact on learning, and sharpening our own instructional lens through coaching.
In Alabama, we have the potential to set a new national standard of academic excellence and student achievement through the prioritization of teacher development. Our schools will not hire our way out of the achievement gap, but we are all in on developing teachers to meet the moment. Excellence is grown, and we must commit ourselves to nurturing it daily. Very few teachers enter as rock stars, but every teacher can finish their career as one. Principals, the challenge is ours…let’s do it!
Dr. Brown is a 25-year educator and leads the Principal Learning Center, a high-rigor, high-support professional learning community that equips school Principals with the instructional vision, leadership skills, and management strategies necessary to drive sustained academic excellence. As the former NSFA Chief Schools Officer, he supported the early growth of charter schools in Alabama.
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