Lots of education issues. What’s missing? Administration. Principals.

One is tempted to play on the word: “It’s not the students, it’s the principal of the thing.” Or, “Lots of principal but too little interest.”

But this is serious business. Serious enough that dozens of foundations, officials and professional groups are involved. The Wallace Fund has a $150 million project. The Broad Foundation $100 million. All seek to define educational leadership and programs to produce it.

Twenty states are considering the School Leaders Licensure Assessment – a six-hour exam.

Our district’s fortunate in the quality of our principals.

But principals come and go. We’ve had three recent departures. There’s a new principal at Roosevelt, a potential new principal at Weber and a search on for City High.

Nor are we unique. The average principal is a 50-year-old white male with 11 years’ experience who will retire at age 57. Half of all school districts report principal shortages. And the increase in demand is projected at 10 to 20 percent a year through 2005.

It doesn’t help that it’s a near-impossible job with ever-increasing tasks.

Schools can be run by teachers. Many are. So some ask, “Why have principals at all?”

At a minimum, “Why perpetuate a hierarchical structure with pay differentials?” Star athletes and musicians are paid more than their business managers. Why must the minimum wage for a new City High principal be three times that of a new City High teacher? Why not pay a district’s best teachers more than administrators?

Torts scholar and Dean Bill Prosser recruited me for my first law school professorship at the University of California in 1960. “The job of the dean,” he once told me, “is to tend to those things that even the janitor refuses to do.”

That used to be a K-12 principal’s job: building manager.

A good year was a respectable football season, buses that ran on time, no deaths from ptomaine poisoning and a leak-proof roof.

No longer. Public officials from President George W. Bush to Gov. Tom Vilsack to our local School Board want schools that are data driven. Schools that regularly report progress toward planned academic goals.

National consensus is emerging that Harvard’s Ron Edmonds' 40-year-old findings were right. Effective schools have effective instructional leadership.

“Principals are perfunctory,” says Walden University’s Irving Buchen.

“They do busywork that could be out-sourced or done by hiring low-level specialists. The only leadership that will make a difference is that of teachers.”

Doctors have nurses. Lawyers have paralegals. Why should instructional leaders have to do it all?

The “principal” in the instructional leadership model would be a “principal teacher,” a mentor, an innovative and inspirational model. Free of administrative hassles. One who’d still teach half-time.

The “busywork” portion of the job would be handled by an office manager – possibly serving more than one school.

U.S. Supreme Court justices delegate tasks to recent law school graduates called law clerks. I once served as one for Justice Hugo Black. If it works for the Court, why couldn’t much of what elementary school principals do be delegated to a university’s graduate student from business, law or education at a small fraction of an administrator’s salary?

How can we “reinvent a principal,” as the Institute for Educational Leadership puts it?

Critics think field-based training is preferable to college of education classrooms.

They charge that classes in educational leadership produce little education and less leadership.

Others call for mentoring and incentives, regular and effective evaluations, greater autonomy and smaller schools. Such schools are not only more manageable. They’re also more sound, emotionally and educationally.

Only 27 percent of districts recruit and train candidates. Should we? As Mildred Blackman and Leslie Fenwick of the Harvard Principals’ Center put it, “The challenge districts face is to encourage the able to be the willing.”

No one doubts we have the able.

Nicholas Johnson is an Iowa City School Board member. More information is available on his Web site www.nicholasjohnson.org.