Our guest blogger is Theodora Chang, Education Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The New York Times reported today that numerous schools receiving federal school improvement funds have struggled to find high-quality principals to replace principals at failing schools. In fact, about 44 percent of the schools receiving turnaround funds are relying on the same principal that they had before:

The aggressive $4 billion program begun by the Obama administration in 2009 to radically transform the country’s worst schools included, as its centerpiece, a plan to install new principals to overhaul most of the failing schools…The Department of Education said it did not know how many principals had been replaced nationwide.

But eight states that include 317 of the 730 schools the department has named as recipients of federal money for school improvement efforts this year — California, Texas, Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, Georgia, New York and North Carolina — provided data in response to a request by The New York Times.

The percentage of such schools that retained principals from the previous school year to this one ranged from about 68 percent in Michigan to about 28 percent in New York. The average across those states was 44 percent.

Principal quality is a topic that often goes lost in current school improvement conversations that focus mainly on teachers. It probably doesn’t help that Republicans in Congress are a little distracted by other priorities at the moment.

The article highlights the fact that the current supply of quality principals does not meet the demand for them, especially in schools looking to dramatically increase student achievement. While the problem is not a new one, it has been brought to light by the Obama administration’s focus on turning around failing schools. Despite recent proposals to cut school leadership programs and longstanding efforts from Republicans to eliminate federal involvement in favor of state and local control over education issues, it’s clear that local districts are having a hard time solving human capital issues.

Research shows that high quality teachers are instrumental to improving student academic outcomes, and high quality principals are instrumental to retaining good teachers. The Obama administration’s Elementary and Secondary Education Act blueprint rightly prioritizes investments in improving access to effective teachers and school leaders through greater investment in competitive grant programs that support promising practices.

One of the greatest challenges to districts’ capacity to turn around schools is the challenge of finding the school leaders with the skills to do the work. Federal support for recruiting and preparing principals specifically to meet this need is a wise and much-needed investment.

Iowa’s Republican legislature last month fast-tracked a bill that would end the state’s guaranteed universal preschool program, instead reserving the state’s budget surplus for corporate tax breaks. And New Jersey Republicans are now following the hawkeye state’s lead.

According to a report in the Newark Star-Ledger, Republicans in the New Jersey legislature want to cut New Jersey’s preschool program from a full day to a half day, and send the money they save to richer, suburban school districts:

A proposal being pushed by Senate Republicans would shift state money to cash-strapped suburban districts by cutting back preschool for the state’s neediest students, according to a document obtained by The Star-Ledger. The senators suggest slicing preschool funding in half — reducing programs from a full-day to a half-day — then using the $300 million saved to boost funding for suburban and rural schools, some of which saw their state aid wiped out in last year’s budget cuts.

Of course, the state should look to aid cash-strapped schools wherever it can. But taking money from low-income preschool students is possibly the worst way to find savings, given the myriad benefits of investing in early childhood education. The Star-Ledger editorial board called the New Jersey GOP’s proposal “dumbfounding,” noting that the state’s preschool program has been an “undoubted success”:

Kids who graduate from those programs are making solid and measurable gains in reading and math. As a result, poor minority kids are closing the gap with their peers in the suburbs on fourth-grade tests. That’s no small achievement. So it is dumbfounding to hear that Senate Republicans want to cripple these programs by taking away $300 million in state funding, and transferring it to wealthier suburban districts.

A study by the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University also found that “children who attended an extended-day, extended-year pre-school program in Elizabeth [New Jersey] experienced greater improvement in test scores compared to peers who attended half-day programs.”

In addition to these obvious educational benefits for individual students, there are also clear economic benefits to investing in preschool programs. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, a dollar spent on a high quality preschool programs “generate[s] a return to society ranging from $1.80 to $17.07.” A new study from the National Institute of Health found that Chicago’s preschool program generates $4-$11 of economic benefits over a child’s lifetime for every dollar spent. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke himself has praised the economy boosting potential of early childhood education.

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) has been noncommittal on his party’s proposal, but in the past has said that preschool is simply “glorified baby-sitting,” And “he recently called it ‘crazy’ that poor districts get such a large share of state education aid.”