FOCUS DC News Wire 9/30/13

 

 

Half the principals in the District’s traditional public schools were deemed “developing” — one rung above “ineffective” — on newly revised evaluations that for the first time sorted administrators by their performance.

 

Fourteen of the city’s 120 principals, more than 11 percent, were rated “highly effective” and were eligible for bonuses of up to $30,000. About one-third were rated “effective,” and the 8 percent who lost their jobs this past spring were rated “ineffective.”

 

Based on a combination of supervisor observation, test scores and other measurements of student progress, the ratings are the principals’ version of the evaluation system that has been used to judge teachers since 2009. The ratings were delivered to administrators this month for their work during the 2012-13 school year, and they drew immediate protest from principals, some of whom called them unfair and too tightly hitched to student test results.

 

School system officials said the ratings are an important tool for recognizing and rewarding the best leaders and for targeting areas for improvement. It should not be surprising, officials said, that so many administrators scored below effective in a city where only about half of the students are proficient on math and reading standardized tests.

 

“Our driving force in all our work is student achievement,” school system spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz said. “This evaluation system allowed us to see a clear picture of our school leader workforce.”

 

The D.C. school system made national headlines in 2009 when then-Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee introduced IMPACT, among the country’s first teacher-evaluation systems to link job security and pay to student test scores.

 

The move stirred criticism, spurred similar initiatives in other jurisdictions and drew the public’s attention to how teachers are judged. But the evaluation of the nation’s principals, who play a pivotal role in school success, has received far less attention.

 

That’s now beginning to change, experts say, partly because the Race to the Top competition — the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar education initiative — gave states an incentive to start basing teacher and principal evaluations on test scores and other measures of student performance.

 

The District spelled out its commitment to evaluating principals based on student progress when it won $75 million under Race to the Top. Test scores and other data have been used to judge principals for several years, but this is the first time they have been compiled into a single rating.

 

The ratings do not significantly affect job security for administrators, who have one-year contracts and can be dismissed for any reason at the end of each school year. But the ratings do determine whether a principal will be seen as a role model and given extra leadership opportunities or whether the principal will be seen as in need of improvement and given extra attention from supervisors.

 

And they also determine pay. In future years, principals rated below “effective” will not be eligible for annual raises, known as step increases.

 

“If you have 50 percent in ‘developing,’ you know something is wrong with the evaluation tool,” said Aona Jefferson, president of the Council of School Officers, the union that represents principals. “It’s not fair. It’s not equal. These people are not failures. They’re doing outstanding work every day.”

 

The proportion of principals scoring below “effective” stands in striking contrast to those who scored below “effective” among the system’s 4,000 teachers. In the 2011-12 school year, two-thirds of teachers were rated “effective” and one-quarter were highly effective. School system officials have not released teacher ratings for the 2012-13 school year.

 

“I don’t think it’s surprising that we see higher ratings for teachers,” said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for the D.C. public schools, who pointed out that school system officials have spent years focusing on teacher evaluations. “We’ve invested a ton of resources, energy and money into developing folks and getting the right folks and holding on to the great folks that we have.”

 

“Highly effective” teachers work disproportionately in ­higher-income wards, which has raised questions about whether the distribution of talent is skewed or whether the evaluation is unfair to teachers in more challenging schools. Officials declined to release a ward-by-ward breakdown for principals. The number of principals is so small that it would be impossible to preserve their privacy, schools officials said.

 

The evaluations include observations by instructional superintendents, who rate principals in six areas of leadership, including retaining talented teachers, engaging families and setting a vision for the school’s instruction and culture.

 

Separately, Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson and principals set goals for how much the whole school and certain groups of students should improve on annual math and reading tests.

 

There is no simple way to say how much each component counts, but there is a blueprint for rolling them into one final rating. That blueprint suggests that proficiency rates, as determined by standardized tests, have significant weight: A principal is rated “effective” only if the school meets its testing goal in either math or reading. The principal is rated below “effective” if schoolwide proficiency in either subject stays flat or falls.

 

But Kamras said some subjectivity is involved, adding that supervisors can boost a principal’s rating in cases of extenuating circumstances.

 

“There’s no perfect system,” he said. “If we had made everything purely mechanical, there would be individuals who would say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t reflect the art of being a principal.’ ”

 

Kamras said the high number of “developing” principals is not a sign that the evaluations are flawed or that the school system has made poor hiring decisions in recent years.

 

“ ‘Developing’ doesn’t mean you’re a bad principal. It just means you’re developing,” he said, meaning that the principal didn’t reach personal goals for the year. “And we’re excited to be working with these folks to help them move up to ‘effective’ and ‘highly effective.’ ”

 

Two principals — one rated “effective” and the other “developing” — said that several accomplished and admirable colleagues were rated “developing” and that it hurt morale. They both spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal.

 

The “developing” principal, who is submitting job applications with other districts, said that test scores are a narrow view of success and that such ratings could deter administrators from coming to work in the District.

 

“I just find it disrespectful,” the principal said. “I work 70 to 80 hours a week, and I’m disappointed.”

 

The District has long struggled with high principal turnover, with about one-quarter of schools opening with new leaders each year.

 

Among the principals rated “highly effective” was Harry Hughes, who oversaw five years of sustained test-score improvements at Tubman Elementary School and who is now an instructional superintendent. Another was Anita Berger, principal at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, a selective magnet.

 

Nine of the 14 “highly effective” principals worked at schools where more than half of the student body is eligible for free or reduced-price meals. The principals were therefore eligible for $30,000 merit bonuses — double that of their counterparts in wealthier schools. Altogether, the school system gave out $315,000 in bonuses to principals. This was also the first year that assistant principals received such ratings, and the performance breakdown was similar, with $105,000 in bonuses going to eight assistant principals.

 

 

Patrick Welsh retired in June after 43 years teaching English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.

 

Erika Dietz was overwhelmed when she started teaching English at T.C. Williams High School two years ago. Not because the 24-year-old struggled to connect with students or to handle the workload. Relentless, yet also patient and charming, she quickly became one of the most popular teachers at the Alexandria school, and in June 2012 she received a state-funded Titan Transformer Award for “outstanding work toward the goal of transformation” of T.C.

 

What bothered her was everything that went along with that goal: the consultants, the jargon, the endless stream of new reform initiatives. “It felt like every buzzword or trend in education was being thrown at us at once,” she told me over the summer, shortly after moving to Texas. “When something didn’t work right away, it was discarded the next year or even midyear.”

 

Her frustrations echo those of other teachers at T.C. and across the country caught up in the politics of education reform. Those politics played out this past week in Florida, where Gov. Rick Scott (R) announced that his state would no longer take a leading role in implementing Common Core tests — a shift prompted by tea party opposition and applauded by many teachers.

 

But the tug of war over standardized tests is just the latest round of a struggle I’ve watched many times before. In the four decades between when I started teaching English at T.C. in 1970 and my retirement this year, I saw countless reforms come and go; some even returned years later disguised in new education lingo. Some that were touted as “best practices” couldn’t work, given Alexandria’s demographics. Others were nothing but common-sense bromides hyped as revolutionary epiphanies. All of them failed to do what I believe to be key to teaching: to make students care about what they’re studying and understand how it’s relevant to their lives.

 

A school for everyone

 

My first encounter with education reform came in 1971, my second year in Alexandria. That’s when the 11th and 12th grades of the city’s three high schools were combined under one roof at T.C. Williams. The move was seen as a way to achieve full integration of black and white students while avoiding the inflammatory issue of who got bussed where. It was also in line with the “comprehensive high school” model, promoted by former Harvard president James Conant, which sought to meet the needs of all students, from the “academically talented” to the “vocationally oriented.”

 

Concerns about racial tensions proved overblown — contrary to the fictional portrayal of the T.C. merger in the Disney film “Remember the Titans” (2000). In fact, my T.C. students had fewer discipline problems than my students at the Catholic school in Rochester, N.Y., where I’d previously taught.

 

But Conant’s idea that an equal opportunity would benefit all students proved to be an illusion. While the bigger school worked well for kids who were self-motivated or had parents urging them on, it soon became apparent that kids from less-involved families, many of them lower-income, lagged behind their peers.

 

 

 

With the school year underway, I recently found myself in a discussion with my landlord about where his two daughters attend elementary school. He told me they both commute about 45 minutes each way to attend a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school in Southeast Washington.

 

His reason for supporting the choice was simple: Having grown up in Northeast, he would never place his daughters in a public school like the one he attended. But for me, this conversation reflected a problematic omission from the school-choice dialogue: the forgotten promise of charter schools and the false choice that parents such as my landlord face as a result.

 

Charter schools, which are public in nature but operate independently of the traditional public school system, were first approved by the Minnesota legislature in the early 1990s. Originally, they promised to serve as isolated laboratories of innovation whose successes could be replicated in struggling traditional public schools.

 

Some charter schools have proved what can be accomplished in high-poverty communities, but the notion of using those lessons to strengthen traditional public schools has not been executed with similar zeal. Consequently, many now view charter-school expansion as a solution itself.

 

In the District, those supportive of this strategy point to the well-known theme of school choice. Parents are voting with their feet, we are told. Yet as any political election reminds us, the exercise of choice is a reflection of the options provided. Almost any parent — certainly including my landlord — would much rather send his or her child to a good public school down the street than enter a lottery to send that child on a long commute to a charter school.

 

Moreover, lost in the focus on charter-school expansion are critical questions about the sort of city Washington might be if our neighborhood public schools continue to disappear. Might community bonds be loosened? What engine of local civic engagement would replace the neighborhood school? What privatized national charter-school management organizations would replace the overburdened, but at least politically accountable, local school leadership? What happens if the charter movement is no longer the cause du jour for reform-minded philanthropists and private funding no longer supplements public dollars?

 

None of this is to say that proven charter schools should be shut down. But it would be foolish to ignore that the rampant growth of charter schools might reshape our city, particularly if it occurs at the expense of neighborhood public schools. Such concerns would carry less weight if the school-choice movement included a growing number of excellent neighborhood public schools — schools that embrace and take seriously important lessons from the charter movement — as a viable option for Washington parents. The existence of such a choice, after all, would represent the fulfillment of the charter-school movement’s admirable initial promise.

 

 

Parents trying to decide which DCPS or charter school is the best fit for their child have faced a confusing array of data. But a newly launched website will give them easy access to information about which schools draw kids from their neighborhood, and more.

 

The Open Schools website, created by a volunteer project called Code for DC, went live earlier this week. The site creates interactive maps based on data from DC's Office of the State Superintendent of Education.

 

Parents can choose a school and see which neighborhoods its students come from.

 

Over the next several months, Code for DC will add other data and functionality to Open Schools. Potential features include:

 

 

The DCPS schools that are seeing more in-boundary students enroll over time (a measure of which schools are gaining the trust of their local communities)

Much of this is data parents haven't had easy access to before. DCPS provides information about school test scores, demographics, and special programs, but parents haven't been able to compare schools easily. Instead they're confronted by a list of links to 238 schools and tables of data without context.

The Public Charter School Board website does allow parents to compare demographic and other information for up to 4 schools at a time, but it doesn't provide easily accessible information about which neighborhoods a school draws its students from.

 

Open Schools' interactive visual interface will offer parents context for test scores and display the choices other parents have made based on that data and other factors. Some of the information provided by the website, such as the number of neighborhood children attending a school, may be more important to a child's social comfort than general demographic information.

 

Code for DC is the local branch of a nationwide effort called Code for America. The organization links programmers, public policy experts, statisticians, and others to provide tools for the public to make better use of government data and services. Teams work in communities around the country, using technology to build the digital public square.

 

Open Schools project leader Harlan Harris said that the group started research in the fall of 2012. When OSSE released new data this spring showing how students commute across the city to school, Harris said, "that gave us the ability to start to build something immediately interesting and useful to parents."