Ontario's principal scarcity: yesterday's abdicated policy responsibility--today's unrecognised challenge.

Williams, Tom R.

This article highlights the principal recruitment problem in Ontario. It suggests that the problem is closely associated with the retirement plans of principals which is resulting in a significant loss of human capital; poorly planned implementation of policy changes which presents problems at the school level and discourages potential leaders from pursuing the principalship; and a lengthy and burdensome certification process. The article concludes that leadership succession planning and development in Ontario represents a major policy challenge to government and school boards alike.

Introduction

The school principal is the linchpin for successful school performance. Yet, in Canada's most populous province, Ontario, interest in the position is waning at the very time when incumbent principals and vice-principals are retiring at unprecedented rates.

This article reports on the retirement plans of Ontario principals and vice-principals and discusses aspects of their role that they find most dissatisfying. It also reports on the reasons that a group of identified potential leaders gave for not pursuing a career in school administration. The paper examines weaknesses in the processes used to develop recent educational policies and poses a series of policy challenges facing policy makers concerned with school administrator recruitment and retention.

The Canadian literature, both anecdotal and empirical, notes that the rates of retirement for principals and vice-principals will be very high during this decade (Echols, Grimmett, & Kitchenham, 1999; Eckstrom, 1997; Evans, 2000; McColl, 1999; McKinnon, 1999; Steffenhagen, 2000; Williams, 2001b). Although there was evidence from the province's College of Teachers that there would be high levels of retirement from teachers' positions, prior to 2001 there was no provincial database that referred to the retirement plans of principals and vice-principals. The only provincial data were aggregated, demographic data that described the total group of people who held provincial certification to be a principal. (The province of Ontario is one of a minority of Canadian provinces that requires principals to hold certification in a process controlled by the Ontario College of Teachers as delegated by the government.) This group included both current incumbents and others who held the certificate but had decided not to pursue administrative positions or were hoping to gain such a position. It did not distinguish between principals and vice-principals and was not broken down by individual school board. In short, it was at such a 'macro' level that analyses masked important insights by role, age, gender, and whether they were incumbents. This information was also not available in many school boards.

There is growing evidence in Ontario that there are declining numbers of applicants for advertised principal vacancies. Superintendents report that the number of applicants for each principal/vice-principal vacancy is lower than in previous years. Presently the issue would appear to be one of the quality and depth of the applicant pool as opposed to an actual deficiency in the number of available candidates (interview with Executive Director, Ontario Principals Council).

The reasons why the principalship in some Canadian provinces is deemed to be a less than attractive position have been the subject of some research (Echols et al., 2000, Evans, 2000; Federation of Women Teachers Association, 1992; Williams, 2001a). Factors include: salary, workload, increased demands for accountability with declining authority to act, teacher union contract management, travel time and poor government--professional educator relations.

Despite these 'signposts', the approaching departure of huge numbers of the very leaders on whom many new educational reforms depend is not on the policy agendas of provincial legislators or most school board trustees.

The Ontario context

The Canadian province of Ontario is Canada's most populated province. Constitutionally in Canada, education is a provincial responsibility and provincial governments have been very actively involved in educational governance. Recent reforms have centralised virtually all educational finance at the provincial level. The 1990s and the early years of this decade saw dramatic provincial government fiscal retrenchment. This has resulted in substantial cuts in educational spending at the local district level. This was coupled with a massive reorganisation of school districts which reduced the number of boards in the public, non-sectarian system by almost 50 per cent. New provincial funding formulae have caused district boards to close schools and cut large numbers of high profile programs. These provincial actions have resulted in increasing acrimony between the government and a wide array of special interest groups, including teachers unions, trustees and parent groups. Principals, too, were directly affected by the provincial changes. Legislation in 1997 removed them from local teacher union bargaining units and defined their role as 'management'. In many district boards, principals became 'orphans'--not involved by superintendents as key members of the management team and no longer permitted to be members of the teachers unions. During this period, government spokespersons, including the premier, began a period of public 'educator bashing'. The combination of all of these factors resulted in plummeting morale within the principal/vice-principal ranks throughout the province.

Ontario public school system principals' study A study (Williams, 2001a) looked at three research questions:

1 What are the retirement plans of incumbent principals and vice-principals in Ontario's public school systems?

2 What are the major dissatisfiers re these roles as experienced by incumbents?

3 What disincentives were identified by a group of individuals, nominated as excellent potential in-school managers who opted not to apply for those roles?

Data for questions 1 and 2 were collected from survey responses from approximately 1000 incumbent principals and vice-principals in Ontario's publicly funded school boards. Data for question 3 were collected through interviews with 92 individuals who, although identified as strong potential candidates for the principalship, had made the choice not to pursue a career as school administrators.

Retirement plans

The principals and vice-principals were asked about their individual retirement plans. In aggregate, the projected years of intended retirement of all respondents was not dissimilar to the projections of the government's College of Teachers. However, when the figures were broken down into specific roles, dramatic numbers emerged.

The figures suggest that, by 2007, 71.7 per cent of elementary school principals and 74.2 per cent of high school principals will have retired. The provincial Ministry of Education and Training figure only dealt with the total number of individuals who hold the provincial principal's certification. Their figure was a cumulative retirement percentage of 62.2 per cent by 2007. This translates into at least 500 more retirements in the next five years than the province's best estimates. For vice-principals, the retirement rates are lower than for principals but still alarming. Although the data do not suggest an absolute inability to fill the number of anticipated vacancies with certificated replacements, another concern does arise. It is apparent that the pool of available candidates will be small relative to the number of vacancies that are looming. This raises issues concerning the quality or depth of the applicant pool from which selections will be made because, numerically, it will not be as 'deep' as previously.

Interviews with Ministry of Education and Training officials and school board administrators suggested that most were not aware of the scale of the pending retirement wave. No systematic thought had been given to its implications at either the provincial level or within most school boards. In fact, the problem was largely unrecognised.

Respondents indicated overwhelmingly that they intended to retire as soon as they reached the threshold that allowed them full benefits under the superannuation plan. This is despite the fact that most would only be in their mid-fifties. In an effort to understand what aspects of the principalship made the job unattractive, respondents were asked to rank 22 disincentives identified from the literature. Their responses are found in Table 2.

Surprisingly, even when the responses in Table 2 were analysed for differences between elementary and secondary school respondents, men and women, principals and vice-principals and across different age groups, the results were remarkably similar. It was interesting that salary concerns ranked only 12th out of 22 factors. Of those factors ranked as high level dissatisfiers by 70 per cent or more of respondents, virtually all related to policy initiatives taken by the provincial government and implemented, often poorly, by local district boards since 1997. The highest ranked dissatisfiers were of three types: those associated with major provincially mandated curriculum changes, those related to major funding cuts that directly impacted on schools, and those related to the nature of the role of principals and vice-principals.

The opt-out group

A unique aspect of the Ontario study was the investigation of the reasons given by a group of individuals identified as superb potential principals, who had recently decided not to pursue a career in school administration; 92 such individuals were interviewed and asked the reasons for their decision. The major deterrents identified by this group are shown in Table 3.

As might be predicted, one of those deterrents is related to personal lifestyle choices. The majority, however, are related to current definitions of the role, selection and leadership development issues and concerns over the climate surrounding public education. Of particular concern was the group's perception that principals could not function as meaningful agents of change. They perceived that the province had centralised so much power over educational matters and imposed so many changes in such a short period of time, while simultaneously cutting resources, that principals could have little in school impact. This perception is undoubtedly exacerbated by personal impressions conveyed to this group by their role models--incumbent principals and vice-principals. (Their views are reflected in Table 2).

Policy issues

This study gives rise to several policy issues:

1 What steps can be taken to ensure a high quality pool of potential replacements for the incumbents who will soon retire?

2 Given the strong antipathy to the manner in which educational changes have been implemented by the government, how might future provincial changes in education policy be better designed?

Development of an adequate candidate pool

The retirement wave projected from the study is now well underway. Evidence from superintendents responsible for principal hiring suggests that the number of applicants per principal/vice-principal vacancy is already dropping in most boards.

What has been the government's reaction to this situation? When asked a question in the legislature concerning the government's plan to deal with the huge retirement rates of principals, the province's Minister of Education replied, 'As in health, in business and in many other sectors, we are facing a significant demographic challenge. As the population ages, we have more people retiring than we have coming in, in a whole range of areas. Unfortunately education is no more immune to this than any other sector' (Government of Ontario, Hansard, 10 October 2001). Although the statement is a trite truism that everyone is getting older, it certainly does not suggest a strong government willingness to exert leadership on the issue of the quantity and/or quality of the replacement pool! Clearly if the problem is to be solved, key policy makers at both the provincial and local levels must first acknowledge its existence and seriousness. Some local district boards and some provincial professional organisations have done this, but no coordinated province-wide initiatives have been undertaken. What policy initiatives might be taken to improve the situation?

Provincial policy initiatives Because the provincial governments in Canada hold most of the constitutional power for public education, that level of government must accept a leadership role in the resolution of this critical policy issue. The government is tight fisted in its control of educational spending. Yet the principal turnover problem is not one that will be solved by 'throwing money' at it. The provincial level policy initiatives required are mostly low cost or no cost items. What initiatives might the province undertake?

1 The government urgently needs to put the principal retirement issue on their education policy agenda. It needs to acknowledge the reality that there is a need to develop procedures to ensure an adequate pool of well-qualified candidates for principal positions and commit to a collaborative strategy with appropriate stakeholder groups to solve the problem. To date, this has not been done. This is curious because much of the province's curriculum reform agenda is dependent upon strong in-school leadership. By simply not engaging itself with the principal retirement issue, the government may be compromising the capacity of the province's schools to implement the very education reforms that were part of its election platform.

2 The massive principal turnover provides the province with the opportunity to examine the dated certification requirements for principals. Currently the requirements are the most extensive and time intensive of any jurisdiction in Canada. Given the changed role of the principal in the last decade, an evaluation of the current lengthy process to achieve principal's certification is warranted. The substantive basis of the certification requirements have not changed dramatically for years and many argue they no longer reflect the skills needed by modern principals. Such a review could also provide the government and its school boards with the opportunity to focus on the leadership requirements of the school system in the future. Almost three out of every four principals in the province will retire by 2007. The policy challenge for the government is to determine what leadership capacity it wants to ensure is reflected in the next generation of principals. Will the province continue to insist upon certification requirements that reflect the in-school leadership needs of yesterday, or will it think through its future leadership requirements? The replacement principals hired by school systems by 2010 will enable or constrain those systems for at least the next two decades. Continued drift using decades-old approaches to running schools will potentially mortgage schools' futures.

The present certification requirements are also too time consuming. For example, they include:

* an acceptable university undergraduate degree

* five years of successful teaching experience

* qualifications in three teaching divisions, one of which must be the Intermediate division

* two specialist qualifications; or a Master's degree or its equivalent

* one specialist qualification and one-half of a Master's degree.

Contrast this to some other Canadian provinces such as Alberta that have no formal provincial certification requirements. Can Ontario any longer support a certification process originally designed to solve in-school leadership needs when the majority of the teaching force did not possess baccalaureate degrees? The costs to candidates and their employers in terms of both money and time to become certified are by far the most onerous in the country. At the very least, in a government that subscribes wholeheartedly to the mantra of public accountability, the province in concert with other stakeholders needs to review and evaluate the efficiency and efficacy of current principal certification requirements. Clearly, given the retirement profiles for principals in Ontario, certification requirements that take most people in excess of seven years to complete will not solve the problems associated with the looming retirement wave.

3 The Ontario College of Teachers, the body charged with the responsibility to administer certification of teachers, also develops and administers principal certification requirements. It is dominated by members of the teachers unions and they control (under power granted by the government) the principal certification process. It does seem curious that the very group (the teachers unions) from which the government expelled principals continues to control principal certification. The province should consider the establishment of an agency within the College to develop and manage principal certification. Members of this agency should be a majority of practising administrators as opposed to teacher union members.

4 For some potential candidates in remote boards, given the geographical vastness of the province, distance from training sites and the associated costs of obtaining certification are barriers. Some means of meeting the certification needs of these candidates should be developed, perhaps with some small financial assistance from the province. For example, with provincial subsidies for a limited number of years, courses for principal certification candidates might be offered in more remote areas even when the critical mass of students normally needed to run a course on a cost effective basis is not met. Such provincial interventions would go a long way towards increasing the candidate pools in remote school boards.

Local district school board initiatives As the employers of principals, district school boards have a huge stake in ensuring an adequate pool of candidates. It is already clear that some school boards that are perceived to have excellent working conditions for principals are successfully raiding other boards for candidates. There exists a sellers' market for good principal candidates and that market will only intensify as retirement rates increase. There is certainly a growing possibility of the emergence of 'have boards' which have an excellent, experienced pool of candidates and 'have not boards' that have seen their ranks depleted, not only by retirement but also by departures for boards with more favourable working conditions. Boards obviously need to do their utmost to make themselves attractive to prospective candidates. As can be seen from the data concerning both principal dissatisfiers and deterrents to potential candidates, salary, although important, is not the highest ranked factor. Rather conditions of work, including availability of financial and human resources as well as appropriate time to do the job, are much more highly ranked. Factors such as these will play a key role in discriminating boards from each other as perceived good places for principals to work.

1 There is an urgent need for all school boards to develop and implement a system leadership development strategy. Executive succession planning is a fundamental responsibility of any well-run organisation. Yet an appalling number of Ontario school boards do not have and do not fund a board-run leadership development program. (At the time of the Ontario study, only about 60 per cent of public school boards had such programs (Williams, 2001a).) This drift or policy vacuum will almost certainly result in a lack of qualified candidates emerging from within those boards and it may well also result in a migration of potential candidates to other boards prepared to invest in their development. Anecdotal evidence is already appearing that this trend has begun.

2 There is a second district policy issue with the potential for even longer-term local impact. The huge turnover of in-school leadership represents an opportunity to fill leadership positions with individuals who have the tools and value orientation to help the school district move towards some future board-developed vision. Unfortunately far too many school boards in Ontario have focused all their attention in recent years on meeting the budget cuts imposed by the province. They have, in essence, defined their mission as adapting current activities to fiscal exigencies or 'the bottom line'. Many have abdicated their responsibilities for strategic planning and, in so doing, failed to meet one of the fundamental responsibilities of trusteeship, to prepare their organisation for a planned future. A serious consequence is that, when facing a massive turnover of principals, many boards have virtually no vision of the future for which they will be hiring their replacements. Without such planning, boards will inevitably hire individuals simply to fill the vacancy as it is currently exists, thus potentially building in an immediate obsolescence to future developments. The strategic question boards must face is: Do they recruit and hire replacements for the retirees who are clones of those they replace; or do they hire for some strategically identified future needs?. Boards of any public organisation have the responsibility to plan for their future. This is critical if they are to articulate the criteria their new leadership must meet. Given the massive turnover that is occurring, the personnel decisions made in the next five years will determine the character of the in-school leadership group of the province's school boards for at least the next 10 to 15 years. Simply allowing the nature of that future to be determined by a combination of strategic default and purely expedient hiring would be a complete failure of trustee responsibility.

3 A third policy area requiring review is the processes used within school boards to select principals and vice-principals. There is a strong perception (in 25% of those who chose not to pursue a principal's career) that principal selection processes are biased and characterised by 'cronyism'. Clearly boards need to audit their processes to ensure that they are not screening out good candidates for the wrong reasons. Interview data suggest the perceived bias relates predominantly to the belief that some superintendents will only support the hiring of those who subscribe to their values. As one interviewee put it, 'Individuals who are seen to be critics of the status quo need not apply'.

4 The policies for assigning principals to schools and the amount of time principals are required to be out of their schools for meetings need review.

a In an effort to be equitable, many boards select a ranked pool of principal candidates and then assign them to schools simply as vacancies occur. In most school boards in Ontario, given their huge size, this can require the appointees either to relocate or incur unacceptable travel times. These policies require immediate review and the development of some creative alternatives. Current principal assignment policies are resulting in large numbers (25%) of potential candidates not following careers as principals due to the personal and family costs they would incur by being forced to accept a position at a long distance from their current residence.

b Boards need to review the number of hours that principals are required to be out of their schools for central office meetings. Surely given modern technology, other ways of allowing administrative meetings to occur can be found.

5 Finally boards must develop policies to ensure the professional development of the huge number of 'rookie' administrators who will be hired. Boards will need to invest heavily in in-service management development programs for their principals in order to compensate for the unprecedented lack of experience in their school management group. The loss of 70 to 80 per cent of current incumbents will mean not only a severe loss of 'institutional memory' for the organisation but also a loss in the capacity for new recruits to be mentored by veteran administrators.

Provincial responsibility for effective policy design

* Provincial governments in Canada have the legal right and responsibility to make education policy. Since the early 1990s, the provincial government has become much more interventionist at the expense of local district boards. Any level of government that has the right to develop policy also has the responsibility to insure that adequate attention is given to matters of implementation when designing new policies (Pal, 1977; Patton & Sawicki, 1993). Without commenting on the substantive merits of the province's education policies themselves, it is clear that the Ontario government did not meet its obligations to plan for successful policy implementation in many of the reforms it introduced. Interviews with senior civil servants indicated that this was due to the intense pressure from politicians to bring about change within very sort time frames.

* It is clear from the Ontario study that the manner in which the provincial government chose to implement legislation that fundamentally altered the school system has had a deleterious impact. (See for example the top ranked dissatisfiers in Table 2.) Although a new curriculum has been implemented, new school district boundaries imposed and new funding formulae introduced, the impact on principals and their potential successors has been devastating. As was seen from the data presented earlier in this paper, the reality appears to be that the government imposed too much change, too quickly, while at the same time cutting available financial and human resources. The government also chose to couple these actions with what can only be described as a media campaign publicly to denigrate those employed as elementary and secondary school educators. Although these actions may have served certain political ends in the government's power struggle with teachers unions, the adversarial environment the government created served only to hinder the successful implementation of many new policy initiatives.

Good policy design always incorporates considerations of implementation. In the Ontario case, it would appear that the political expedient of demonstrating the aura of dramatic educational change was accorded a much higher priority than the actual implementation of these changes. This caused those on the front lines of implementation--school principals--to bear the brunt of pressures associated with the government's failure, in their design of the new policies, to consider basic change management literature. Consequently there currently is a highly demoralised principals' cadre, most of whom cannot wait until their retirement date approaches. Equally devastating is the fact that many potentially strong future candidates for the principalship see the current incumbents of that role struggling to implement policies that were inadequately designed. Given such struggling role models, it should not be surprising that large numbers of educators who have the potential to become school principals are choosing not to follow careers in school administration. To quote one respondent in the Ontario study: Who needs it? Why would anyone want to do a job where you have not got the necessary time, money or staff to do what needs to be done and then have some cabinet ministers publicly portray us as not offering a good educational program! (personal interview)

In Ontario, the government's objective would appear to have been, change at any cost! In the case of the Ontario principalship--the ill-conceived or ignored change strategy has resulted in immense human resource costs that have the potential to mortgage the educational leadership future of Ontario's public elementary and secondary schools.

Summary

The Ontario case is illustrative of several themes. First is the need for governments at all levels that are responsible for education to accept the responsibility for leadership succession planning and development in their organisations. This is not simply a challenge in education systems. As Chambers, Foulon, Handfield-Nones, Hankin, & Michaels (1998) note: Companies are about to be engaged in a war for senior executive talent that will remain a defining characteristic of their competitive landscape for decades to come. Yet most are ill-prepared, and even the best are vulnerable. (p.46)

This retirement problem in public education in Ontario is acute. The problem is systemic. The implications of demographics have been ignored. Management information systems at both the provincial and board levels that should have allowed for ample planning time to accommodate the now recognised retirement rates did not, and still do not, exist. The provincial government has been conspicuous by its silence and lack of intervention concerning a systemic human resource deficiency for which it is ultimately responsible in partnership with its school board partners. This is certainly a strange abdication of corporate responsibility on the part of a provincial government that emphasises public accountability.

The responsibility of governments to design and enact policy that also does due diligence to matters of implementation is a second major theme. The Ontario government implemented a massive educational change agenda. Yet it did so without sufficient lead time and resources and without a broad coalition to implement the changes. It could be argued that many of the Ontario government educational initiatives simply ignored much of the current organisational change literature. (See for example the work of Kotter, 1996.) A consequence of this failure adequately to design and manage major change initiatives is a demoralised principal and vice-principal group--the very group that is key to the actual operationalisation of the changes wanted by the provincial politicians. Those responsible for the in-school implementation of the new policies had to operate in an environment poisoned by political, anti-education rhetoric from the government on the one hand and union anti-government rhetoric on the other. It should be no surprise that principals who have had to function in such a milieu want to retire as soon as the superannuation scheme allows, despite the fact that they are relatively young and have a number of potentially productive years ahead--a loss of human capital at a time it is desperately needed! A hidden cost of these policy weaknesses has been that a large group of potential successors to the retiring principals have watched the implementation struggles of incumbents and concluded, 'Who needs it?'. This further exacerbated the decline in the system's leadership pool. Finally, although most principal vacancies in the next five years will be filled, the policy question remains: Will they be the fight people to provide leadership to accomplish the strategic goals which boards must set for themselves. In the cases where boards have accepted their responsibilities for strategic planning, the chances are there will be a good fit. However, because many boards have no strategic educational vision other than to balance the budget and react to provincial vicissitudes, any fit between new hires and future needs may be the result of chance.

Finally there is the matter of principal training and development. The Ontario certification process is cumbersome, expensive and heavily time consuming. Its content is not consistent with best practices in management development in either the public or private sectors. It is unclear, given experience in other jurisdictions, whether certification is even a necessity. Given the need in the rest of the decade for large numbers of high quality candidates for applicant pools, the province cannot afford certification processes whose content may not be directly useful and that take five to seven years for candidates to complete.

In many public sector arenas, the difficulty is to get the appropriate agency or level of government to formulate policy to solve acknowledged problems. In the Ontario disappearing principal case, the issue is more basic--how to get people to acknowledge there is even a problem that requires policy development!

Keywords

administrator selection

certification

leadership training

principals

recruitment

retirement Table 1 Retirement plans of survey respondents by role--annual and cumulative percentages Retirement year Respondents 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 Elementary principal % of total 11.4 14.22 11.83 11.0 8.5 Cumulative % 11.4 25.6 37.4 48.4 56.9 Elementary vice-principal % of total 4.1 4.6 4.1 5.1 8.2 Cumulative % 4.1 8.7 12.8 17.9 26.1 Secondary principal % of total 12.1 9.5 15.5 9.5 13.8 Cumulative % 12.1 21.6 37.1 46.6 60.4 Secondary vice-principal % of total 8.2 7.5 8.2 2.2 4.5 Cumulative % 8.2 15.7 23.9 26.1 30.6 Ontario College of Teachers projections % of total 13.2 23.2 32.4 40.9 48.7 Retirement year Respondents 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010+ Elementary principal % of total 7.6 7.2 4.4 5.1 18.8 Cumulative % 64.5 71.7 76.1 81.2 100 Elementary vice-principal % of total 5.1 7.2 5.6 2.6 53.3 Cumulative % 31.2 38.4 44.0 46.6 99.9 Secondary principal % of total 7.8 6.0 7.8 3.4 14.7 Cumulative % 68.2 74.2 82.0 85.4 100 Secondary vice-principal % of total 5.2 7.5 5.2 5.2 46.3 Cumulative % 35.8 43.3 48.5 53.7 100 Ontario College of Teachers projections % of total 56.0 62.2 67.7 72.4 76.3 Job dissatisfiers Table 2 Rank order of dissatisfiers Total Rank factor % 1 Adequacy of time to plan for provincially 92 mandated changes 2 Number of curriculum changes mandated by the 86 province 3 Adequacy of time to work with students 83 4 Amount of in-school staff support given 79 principal workload requirements 5 Amount of time the job requires 78 6 Human resources made available to meet the 77 school's educational needs 7 Non-student reporting requirements 73 8 Financial resources available to meet the 73 school's educational needs 9 Parent demands 68 10 Accountability expectations for in-school 65 administrators 11 Need to balance demands from competing 64 constituencies 12 Adequacy of salary 62 13 Changes in principal's legal status 61 14 Amount of discretionary financial resources 56 available 15 New requirements for increased parental 54 involvement through school councils 16 Employee relations climate with board's teachers 48 17 Support accorded to administrators by board 46 18 Support for principals and/or vice principals 37 from senior management 19 Amount of decision-making authority for 35 principals/vice-principals 20 Respect for principals/vice-principals from 24 the community 21 Threats the school may be a candidate 22 for closure 22 Respect for principals/vice-principals from 15 Table 3 Deterrents to seeking administrative position identified by interviewees Total Rank factor % 1 Perceived inability for principals/vice-principals to effect change 60.9 2 Lifestyle/family commitments 42.4 3 Government/media portrayal of public education 40.2 4 Removal of principals/vice-principals from the union 39.1 5 Perceived amount of time P/VP is off-site at meetings 30.4 6 Workload demands on personal time 29.3 7 Cost of obtaining certification 26.1 8 Travel time and cost to reach location of principalship 26.1 9 Perceived bias and cronyism of board selection processes 25.0 10 Lack of encouragement or support from management 23.9 11 Salary 23.9

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Tom Williams is Professor in the School of Policy Studies, Queen's University, 99 University Avenue, Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L3N6. E-mail: Professor Tom Williams <trwe@post.queensu.ca>