- Principal Turnovers Reflect Poorly on Schools
- Should Principals Be Treated Like CEOs?
Principal Turnovers Reflect Poorly on Schools
The Washington Informer
By Dorothy Rowley
June 25, 2014
The plan calls for jump-starting the 2014-15 school year with not just the best teachers, but also with the best principals.
However, there will likely be a repeat cycle of leadership instability within the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) system, which has been rocked by the terminations of at least eight veteran principals and several of their colleagues who’ve been shuffled around. Others tipping their hats this summer, include Rory Pullens, the highly-regarded principal of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Northwest, who resigned for a post in California, and Patrick Pope, who recently announced his retirement after transforming Savoy Elementary in Southeast into one of the nation’s top arts and music schools.
“I’m very concerned about the turnover of principals,” said Mark Jones, who represents Ward 5 on the D.C. Board of Education. “I’m a firm believer that consistency and having a stable workforce of teachers and principals makes a big difference in the lives of our children,” said Jones, 54, who added that while some parents requested certain terminations, other parents and students believed their principals had done an exemplary job.
“I understand that at the end of the day, it’s the call of the public schools system officials, but we’ve just got to make a concerted effort to ensure the rights of both our principals and teachers the first time around.”
Jones said principal turnovers have been ongoing since 2007 when Michelle Rhee took over as chancellor. During her three-year tenure, Rhee fired 36 principals and closed 23 schools in just one year.
According to a 2012 Rand Corporation report that focused on principal firings, in many instances the schools took a nosedive after the principals left.
However, in the case of DCPS, principals will have an opportunity to keep their jobs based on their performance evaluations.
School spokesperson Melissa Salmanowitz explained that unlike teachers whose performances next year will be gauged in accordance with a new state assessment called the “Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College Careers,” the principals will be evaluated on existing measures.
“It could be a number of different assessments that will be used for accountability purposes,” Salmanowitz said.
Meanwhile, since assuming the helm, Henderson has continued to raise the ire of parents and community leaders throughout the District with her decision in January 2013 to close 15 so-called low-performing or under-enrolled schools – most of which served students in wards 5, 7 and 8.
At the end of school year 2012-13, Henderson continued to exert an iron-fist school reformation initiative that gave the boot to 20 percent of the school system’s principals.
That round of ousters, although lower than in previous years, outweighs the number reported for neighboring school systems.
D.C. Council member David Catania (I-At Large), chair of the council’s Committee on Education, has criticized Henderson for the manner in which she’s approached school reform.
A candidate for the November mayoral election – Catania wants school officials to develop an evaluation system for principals that also enables them to rate their supervisors without fear of reprisal – has given no indication whether he’ll keep Henderson if he wins.
But he said via a June 23 email that he thinks the constant terminations of principals only serve to weaken schools, and that the retention of experienced, high-quality school leadership is critical to academic excellence.
“There’s something amiss when we have such a high degree of turnovers among our most talented principals,” Catania, 46, said in an earlier interview. “A consistently high principal turnover rate is indicative of the incompetence of those who screen, hire and fire them. . . . These folks need to be held accountable, and to date they have not – and I doubt they ever will be under this chancellor.”
In most school districts across the country, principals are offered contracts that extend three to five years. In stark comparison, DCPS principals are given one-year contracts and the decision to fire them can come without cause.
“We need to invest in workforce and professional development to maintain those principals to whom we’ve made a commitment to hire – and I just don’t see enough of that happening,” Jones said, adding that principals should be offered multi-year contracts.
“There may be a reason behind one-year contracts, but that doesn’t make it right,” said Jones. “The contracts are set up so that if a principal is not doing their job, the chancellor can put fire under them and eventually have them removed,” he said. “But that’s counterproductive. A one-year contract just makes principals tentative. It does not give them ample time to prepare to develop a plan then implement and execute it.”
In addition, Cathy Reilly, a Northwest resident whose three children are DCPS graduates, said the one-year contract gives prospective educators a sense that they can move into the city and invest in schools and their communities.
“There’s need for accountability, but at the same time we’ve lost some very good principals over the controversial IMPACT evaluations which are often too rigid,” said Reilly. “I’m not happy to see that so many of them have left the system.”
Daniel del Pielago, education organizer for the grassroots advocacy group Empower DC, referred to the yet-to-be explained 2012 ouster of Michael Johnson, the principal who’s credited with turning around the once-troubled Phelps Architecture, Construction and Engineering High School in Northeast, to become one of the District’s model schools.
Although parents and students protested Johnson’s ouster, their outrage failed to move administrators at the Central Office in Northwest.
“Empower D.C. looks at how parents are and are not involved in all of this,” said del Pielago, 41. “In situations where parents are happy with the principal that they have, if for some reason the Central administration decides to remove them – like in the situation at Phelps – parents automatically have no say in the matter,” he said.
“This kind of mirrors what happens with the teachers as well. We have this instability that happens every year, so our students are continually exposed to it, which I think is a crime. If there were more parents involved in making these decisions over who stays and who goes, it would definitely make for a stronger and better public schools system.”
Should Principals Be Treated Like CEOs?
The Atlantic
By Jacoba Urist
June 24 2014
It’s a widely held belief that a talented leader is the key to a successful school. Research shows that highly effective principals put a student’s achievement gains two to seven months ahead in a single school year—while weak leaders slow a student’s progress by the same amount.
But how can schools attract and retain good principals? One education-policy think tank suggests that part of the answer may be making the role more like an executive and giving each principal a $100,000 salary raise.
A new report, released Tuesday by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, says too many U.S. principals lack the capacity to lead. After tracking five urban districts across the country—nearly all of which had tried to improve principal hiring practices in recent years—the study concluded that being a principal is a high-pressure, grueling, and underpaid job, where responsibilities significantly exceed authority. At a time of intensifying testing standards, when U.S. students are falling behind their international peers, schools need top-rate leaders more than ever. But inadequate salaries and limited power over key hiring decisions make the job an increasingly tougher sell. Unsurprisingly, good principals tend to come and go.
Fordham’s solution: Stop viewing principals as “glorified teachers” and more as “executives with expertise in instruction, operations, and finance.” To that end, principals should earn considerably more than other school staff who have less responsibility. And like all effective managers, principals need the ability to build a leadership team, so their duties—from academics to discipline—don’t overwhelm them. Make principalship a “phenomenal career,” the argument goes, and great people will apply.
“Todays principals are in a senior management position,” says Dr. Chester E. Finn, Jr., a former assistant secretary of education under Ronald Reagan and president of the Fordham Institute. “Demands are placed on them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They are the CEO of the school. As in any other field, if you want qualified people, you are going to have to pay principals commensurate with the job that they currently have.”
Much has changed over the last 20 years, he explains. Above all, the principal is now judged by student achievement and faces cascading sanctions and interventions if a school doesn’t hit certain proficiency metrics. The data burden is huge, and the sheer number of decisions can be overpowering. Which child has to go to summer school? Which reading program needs to be replaced? Which teacher needs additional professional development?
“Layer on top of that, school choice. Kids and parents have a variety of mechanisms if they aren’t satisfied,” says Dr. Finn, who sees a talent problem particularly in small towns, where it’s hard to attract superstars in education. “So now it’s also the principal’s job to potentially market the school to various constituencies and then, given tight budgets, principals also have to be fundraisers with local businesses some of the time.”
However, he warns, raising a principal’s pay alone won’t attract a new generation of leaders. Giving each principal a $100,00 raise—something he believes the country can afford, as it will amount to less than 2 percent of the K-12 school budget—goes hand in hand with giving them more professional respect and autonomy. “Who wants to be a top notch leader in a low notch job?” he says. After all, private schools already compensate headmasters like executives, as do private and public universities.
Ironically though, in many districts aspiring teachers take a pay cut on their way to the principal’s office. “It’s not uncommon for principals to have to become an assistant principal first,” says Daniela Doyle, a senior consultant with Public Impact and co-author of the Fordham study. “Often it’s not that the base pay is lower, it’s that teachers are eligible for supplemental pay through special duties they can assume or national board certifications.” Above all else, Doyle found the five school districts struggled with principal placement because they don’t really recruit. “There are great principal candidates falling through the cracks,” she says. “Schools did very little to actively find people. They often just advertised a position, sitting back and waiting for the talent to come to them, which we know from other sectors isn’t usually an effective strategy.”
And without broader recruiting initiatives—especially in smaller cities and rural districts—raises won’t necessarily attract better applicants. As Dr. Eric A. Hanushek, senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and co-author of the 2013 study School Leaders Matter, cautions, increased salaries alone may not have a “huge effect” on the supply of potential principals because leaders are typically drawn from the local pool of teachers anyway.
“In many small towns, the educators are already in the top quartile of college earners,” explains Todd Whitaker, professor of educational leadership at Indiana State University and author of the book What Great Principals Do Differently. “There’s no question that principals are underpaid. But a number that might make sense in New York City just isn’t the problem hiring in Missouri,” says Whitaker, who believes most principals would rather have a full-time assistant than a hefty raise. “It’s not necessarily even the hours. It’s the intensity. The truth is, if we gave principals an assistant or a lot more money, we probably end up giving them increased responsibilities and we’re right back where we started.”
In other words, one way to fix the leadership shortage may be not increased salary, but additional funding for assistant principals, school counselors, and other administrative support staff. Principals are like all people with high responsibility, according to Kate Rousmaniere, professor of educational leadership at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio and author of The Principal’s Office: A Social History of the American School Principal. They work better in teams, where they can share the workload.
But while there’s certainly a “you-get-what-you pay-for” aspect to any profession, educators don’t necessarily correspond neatly to executives. Generally, bonuses work, so long as they don’t cause principals to focus on certain criteria at the expense of their job as a whole, according to Jesse Fried, professor of law at Harvard and co-author of Pay without Performance: The Unfulfilled Promise of Executive Compensation. “People going into teaching are obviously not motivated solely by the prospect of financial gain,” he says. “[But] if society substantially underpays principals, many good people will not seek these jobs or stay in them.”
The task, then, is to strike the right balance. How much should we pay principals to attract new talent, and how much additional support do they need to meet the demands of the modern job? How do we make the role more appealing to promising candidates without pouring more money into retaining ineffective people already in place? “If policymakers are serious about figuring out which pay arrangements for principals are optimal,” proposes Fried, “they should try to run several pilot programs, each with different arrangements, and then try to learn from this experiment.”