Who to replace failing principals?

U.S. Plan to Replace Failing Principals Hits Snag:  Who Will Step In?  -  Sam Dillon (New York Times)

(link to article at the New York Times)

1chance2learn.net is in no way affiliated with writer Sam Dillon or the New York Times.  In fact, we doubt they even know we exist.  Please click the link above to view the article at the New York Times site.

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Could it be that we are beginning to see the beginning of the failure of the radical school reform agenda? The New York Times reports that efforts to fire principals of failing schools have faltered because the principals can't be replaced -- no one else wants the jobs.

I very much doubt that we will soon see the end of anti-education rhetoric from politicians. As the article points out, though, legal requirements were quietly lowered to keep positions filled. Expect more of the same.  (Review by Scott Lawson)  

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — 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.

That policy decision, though, ran into a difficult reality: there simply were not enough qualified principals-in-waiting to take over. Many school superintendents also complained that replacing principals could throw their schools into even more turmoil, hindering nascent turnaround efforts.
As a result, the Department of Education softened the hit-the-road plans for principals of underperforming schools laid out in the program rules. It issued guidelines allowing principals hired as part of local improvement efforts within the last two years to stay on, then interpreted that grandfather clause to mean three years.

Although the program created an expectation that most schools would get new leadership, new data from eight large states show that many principals’ offices in failing schools still bear the same nameplates. About 44 percent of schools receiving federal turnaround money in these states still have the same principals who were leading them last year.

Some experts said allowing so many schools to keep the same principal threatened to make one of Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s signature policy initiatives similar to previous failed turnaround efforts at many of the same schools.



“To think that the same leader with a bit more money is going to accomplish tremendous change is misguided,” said Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group that began leading turnaround efforts in Chicago when Mr. Duncan was the superintendent there.
“This idea of a light-touch turnaround is going to sully the whole effort,” Mr. Cawley added.
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. Pennsylvania, a large recipient of the federal grants, did not respond to requests for the data.
In an interview, Mr. Duncan said the program was reinvigorating many ailing schools. “We are absolutely trying to challenge the status quo,” he said.

He has frequently portrayed the turnaround campaign he led in Chicago as one of the few in American public education.

But as secretary, he said, he has discovered that many districts nationwide had been carrying out their own “aggressive” school transformation efforts before he got to Washington, appointing committed new principals.

“The last thing that you want to do is kick somebody out who has rolled up their sleeves and taken on the largest challenge in public education,” he said.

The turnaround program here in Columbus offers an example of the pattern. Columbus was allotted about $20 million to remake seven schools that Ohio authorities had identified as among the state’s worst.
At three schools, the district retained principals serving since fall 2007. In the other four, it installed new principals last summer, drawn from Columbus schools.

At Champion Middle School, in a neighborhood with a housing project plagued by drugs and poverty, mired in failure despite years of turnaround efforts, the district installed a principal who had once taught at Champion, Edward Baker. Mr. Baker was available because the district last summer closed the declining middle school where he had been principal.

“I think our superintendent selected me because I’d been a teacher at Champion and she knew I had a little background on the neighborhood,” Mr. Baker said.

In an interview at her headquarters, Gene T. Harris, the Columbus superintendent, said she had given careful thought to who should lead all seven schools. She left three principals in place, Ms. Harris said, because those schools suffered from chronically high staff turnover. “And it was within the guidelines,” she said, referring to the federal rules allowing districts to retain principals hired no earlier than the 2007-08 school year as part of an improvement effort.

“If I see that the principal has been there a short time and is showing some promise,” she said, “then I have the best of all worlds — I can keep them there, maintain the momentum and also maintain the stability.”

Because leading schools out of chronic failure is harder than managing a successful school — often requiring more creative problem-solving abilities and stronger leadership, among other skills — the supply of principals capable of doing the work is tiny.

Most of the nation’s 1,200 schools, colleges and departments of education do offer school leadership training. “But only a tiny percentage really prepare leaders for school turnaround,” said Arthur Levine, a former president of Teachers College who wrote a 2005 study of principal training.

A handful of programs, including several run by nonprofit groups like New Leaders for New Schools, and others like the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program, have built a reputation for success by emphasizing in-school leadership training, rather than traditional academic research and class work.

In Chicago, federal money is financing an overhaul of Phillips Academy High School. Mr. Cawley’s nonprofit trained Phillips’s new principal, Terrance Little, by having him work alongside mentor principals experienced at school makeovers.

“If we’re talking about turning around 700 schools, I don’t think you can find 700 principals who are capable of taking on the challenge of this work,” Mr. Little said. “If you could, why would we have this many failing schools?”

In fact, few of the schools receiving federal money installed principals with specialized training, experts said. “What we’re seeing is a principal shuffle — Principal A moving to school B, B to C and other permutations,” Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, said in a statement.

Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents 66 urban districts, said that from the beginning, superintendents worried about finding qualified school leaders.
“This was a human capital problem — these people don’t grow on trees,” Mr. Casserly said.

And since some districts had replaced principals as part of homegrown improvement efforts, superintendents asked Mr. Duncan for flexibility.

The rules released in December 2009 said schools using the most popular overhaul models had to replace principals unless they had been hired “within the last two years.” In March, the department clarified that to mean, unless hired before 2007-8.

“Duncan has been talking about bringing major changes fast, and keeping a principal who’s been there for three years is not radical change,” said Jack Jennings, an education analyst who has studied school makeover efforts. “Maybe it shows that once the administration got into this campaign, they saw it was more complicated than their rhetoric.”

A version of this article appeared in print on February 8, 2011, on page A15 of the New York edition.