Group items tagged

Principals new to their schools face a variety of challenges that can influence their likelihood of improving their schools' performance and their likelihood of remaining the principal. Understanding the actions that principals take and the working conditions they face in the first year can inform efforts to promote school improvement and principal retention, but the research on first-year principals' experiences is limited. This report examines the actions and perceived working conditions of first-year principals, relating information on those factors to subsequent school achievement and principal retention. This report presents findings from an analysis of schools led by principals who were in their first year at their schools. Throughout this report, we define first-year principals as principals in their first year at a given school including those principals with previous experience as principals at other schools. The study is based on data that were collected to support the RAND Corporation's seven-year formative and summative evaluation of New Leaders. New Leaders is an organization that is dedicated to promoting student achievement by developing outstanding school leaders to serve in urban schools. The findings will be of interest to policymakers in school districts, charter management organizations (CMOs), state education agencies, and principal preparation programs, in addition to principals themselves and teachers. This research was conducted in RAND Education, a unit of the RAND Corporation, under a contract with New Leaders.

Much has been written about the importance of school leadership, but there is surprisingly little systematic evidence on this topic. This paper presents preliminary estimates of key elements of the market for school principals, employing rich panel data on principals from Texas State. The consideration of teacher movements across schools suggests that principals follow patterns quite similar to those of teachers - preferring schools that have less demands as indicated by higher income students, higher achieving students, and fewer minority students. Looking at the impact of principals on student achievement, the authors find some small but significant effects of the tenure of a principal in a school. More significant, however, are the estimates of variations in principal effectiveness. The variation in principal effectiveness tends to be largest in high poverty schools, consistent with hypothesis that principal ability is most important in schools serving the most disadvantaged students. Finally, considering principal mobility, the authors find that principals who stay in a school tend to be more effective than those who move to other schools.

While the importance of effective principals is undisputed, few studies have addressed what specific skills principals need to promote school success. This study draws on unique data combining survey responses from principals, assistant principals, teachers and parents with rich administrative data to identify which principal skills matter most for school outcomes. Factor analysis of a 42-item task inventory distinguishes five skill categories, yet only one of them, the principals' organization management skills, consistently predicts student achievement growth and other success measures. Analysis of evaluations of principals by assistant principals confirms this central result. Our analysis argues for a broad view of instructional leadership that includes general organizational management skills as a key complement to the work of supporting curriculum and instruction.

Now, as I ponder a recent CSA member survey, I see how many of you have lost your optimism.   Whether Principals, Assistant Principals or Education Administrators, 48 percent of you were dissatisfied with your jobs in 2009 compared to 59 percent today. Among Principals the rate of dissatisfaction was 68 percent in 2009, which was when the city and state budget cuts began but we were cushioned by President Obama's American Recovery Act. Today, 73 percent of Principals are dissatisfied with their workload, their wages and their job security. As demands on Principals continue to rise and budgets shrink, we better think about how we'll recruit and retain APs, EAs and teachers to fill the Principal pipeline. Back in 2006, when The New York Times reported that a startling number of experienced Principals were fleeing the Bloomberg/Klein school system, the DOE seemed to think the attrition was a normal result of baby boomer burn-out or fear of accountability. Experienced educators were often viewed as enemies of change.

More than one out of every five principals leaves their school each year. In some cases, these career changes are driven by the choices of district leadership. In other cases, principals initiate the move, often demonstrating preferences to work in schools with higher achieving students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. Principals often use schools with many poor or low-achieving students as stepping stones to what they view as more desirable assignments. We use longitudinal data from one large urban school district to study the relationship between principal turnover and school outcomes. We find that principal turnover is, on average, detrimental to school performance. Frequent turnover of school leadership results in lower teacher retention and lower student achievement gains. Leadership changes are particularly harmful for high poverty schools, low-achieving schools, and schools with many inexperienced teachers. These schools not only suffer from high rates of principal turnover but are also unable to attract experienced successors. The negative effect of leadership changes can be mitigated when vacancies are filled by individuals with prior experience leading other schools. However, the majority of new principals in high poverty and low-performing schools lack prior leadership experience and leave when more attractive positions become available in other schools.

Although much has been written about the importance of leadership in the determination of organizational success, there is little quantitative evidence due to the difficulty of separating the impact of leaders from other organizational components - particularly in the public sector. Schools provide an especially rich environment for studying the impact of public sector management, not only because of the hypothesized importance of leadership but also because of the plentiful achievement data that provide information on institutional outcomes. Outcome-based estimates of principal value-added to student achievement reveal significant variation in principal quality that appears to be larger for high-poverty schools. Alternate lower-bound estimates based on direct estimation of the variance yield smaller estimates of the variation in principal productivity but ones that are still important, particularly for high poverty schools. Patterns of teacher exits by principal quality validate the notion that a primary channel for principal influence is the management of the teacher force. Finally, looking at principal transitions by quality reveals little systematic evidence that more effective leaders have a higher probability of exiting high poverty schools.

The principals of New York State are amazing. When the State Education Department began creating its "educator evaluation system," it called together the principals and showed them what it was up to. It showed them a video of guys building a plane while it was flying. This was called, in self-congratulatory parlance, "building a plane in mid-air." A few principals noticed that the guys building the exterior of the plane were wearing parachutes, but the passengers didn't have parachutes. The principals realized that they, their staff, and their students were the passengers. The ones with the parachutes were the overseers at the New York State Education Department. For them, it was a lark, but the evaluation system they created was do-or-die for the hapless passengers. The principals rose up in revolt, led by Carol Burris and Sean Feeney.

n October, two Long Island principals posted online a letter detailing their concerns with a new state evaluation system for teachers and principals. They hoped other principals would sign it, and did they ever, starting on Long Island and rippling across the state. As of Sunday, 764 principals - including 31 from five Central New York counties - had signed the letter. Besides principals, scores of other educators signed, too.

"No one knows who I am," exclaimed a senior in a high-poverty, predominantly minority and low-performing high school in the Austin area. She explained, "I have been at this school four years and had four principals and six algebra I teachers." Elsewhere in Texas, the first school to be closed by the state for low performance was Johnston High School, which was led by 13 principals in the 11 years preceding closure. The school also had a teacher turnover rate greater than 25 percent for almost all of the years and greater than 30 percent for 7 of the years. While the above examples are rather extreme cases, they do underscore two interconnected issues - teacher and principal turnover - that often plague low-performing schools and, in the case of principal turnover, afflict a wide range of schools regardless of performance or school demographics. In recent years, those seeking to improve schooling through efforts to increase teacher effectiveness and build teacher capacity have quickly realized that such efforts rely heavily on principal capacity and stability.

On the Schoolbook blog of the New York Times, Philip Weinberg takes issue with my two Edwize posts (Part 1 and Part 2) on New York's new teacher evaluation law. Weinberg is a principal of a New York City public high school and a supporter of the widely circulated Long Island principals' letter criticizing the New York teacher evaluation law, and he writes that my posts are a response to that letter. On this point, he is simply wrong: even a cursory reading of the posts makes it clear that I did not discuss the letter, but rather set out to provide a comprehensive explanation of the more important and complex features of the new teacher evaluation framework. But Weinberg's reading of the issues involving teacher evaluation is nonetheless worth addressing, as it brings much needed clarity to the underlying agenda of the principals' letter. And since the UFT's stance toward the Long Island principals' letter is a frequent matter of speculation, it provides an opportunity to explain where we stand.

Principals who object to the new state system to evaluate teachers and principals based on student testing have begun circulating a petition against it. In his On Education column in The New York Times Monday, Michael Winerip reported that more than 650 principals from around the state - 18 from New York City schools - had signed. Here, a few of the principals who signed give their reasons.

Principals who object to the new state system to evaluate teachers and principals based on student testing have begun circulating a petition against it. In his On Education column in The New York Times on Monday, Michael Winerip reported that more than 650 principals around the state - 18 from New York City schools - had signed. A number of principals responded to a request for their reasons, and SchoolBook published several Monday. Here are some additional replies.

Through the years there have been many bitter teacher strikes and too many student protests to count. But a principals' revolt? "Principals don't revolt," said Bernard Kaplan of Great Neck North High School on Long Island, who has been one for 20 years. "Principals want to go along with the system and do what they're told." But President Obama and his signature education program, Race to the Top, along with John B. King Jr., the New York State commissioner of education, deserve credit for spurring what is believed to be the first principals' revolt in history.

Gateways to the Principalship: State Power to Improve the Quality of School Leaders proposes state policies for improving principal effectiveness and student achievement. It uses policy examples from eight "lagging" and eight "leading" states as a means of advocating for a wide range of policy actions aimed at influencing principal preparation, licensure and retention. The report, however, has several flaws that undermine its usefulness. It provides little explanation on how the state exemplars were selected or why they were considered to be leading or lagging. It makes little use of existing research. It does not report on extensive current state and professional activities on leadership standards, program accreditation and licensure requirements that address exactly these features. It recommends ending the "monopoly" of higher education in principal preparation and broadening (or lowering) the criteria for becoming a principal, but it provides no research or other evidence that such changes are warranted, will improve student achievement, or have other beneficial effects. The report's endorsement of broadly accepted, almost platitudinous reform principles, coupled with unsupported and possibly counterproductive recommendations, renders the report of little value in improving the quality of principals.

Of the unions representing public school teachers and principals in New York City, the principals' union had played a passive role in the charged and increasingly divisive dispute over an evaluation system to gauge the performance of teachers and principals in 33 struggling schools receiving federal grants to help improve their results. No longer. On Wednesday, the principals' union president, Ernest A. Logan, pre-emptively condemned the city's proposal to close and reopen most of those schools under a new improvement model, saying in a strongly worded letter to the state's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., that it is simply a ploy to shut out the unions.

"I recently published a post about how a teacher in New York was wronged by the state's controversial new educator evaluation system, which is based in large part on student standardized test scores. Here's a story about a school principal's personal experience with the scores. This was written by Sean C. Feeney, principal of The Wheatley School in New York and president of the Nassau County High School Principals Association. He is a co-author of  the New York Principals letter of concern regarding the evaluation of teachers by student test scores. It has been signed by more than 1,535 New York principals and more than 6,500 teachers, parents, professors, administrators and citizens."

Sharon McNary believes in having tough teacher evaluations. But these days, the Memphis principal finds herself rushing to cram in what amounts to 20 times the number of observations previously required for veteran teachers - including those she knows are excellent - sometimes to the detriment of her other duties. "I don't think there's a principal that would say they don't agree we don't need a more rigorous evaluation system," says Ms. McNary, who is president of the Tennessee Principals Association as well as principal at Richland Elementary. "But now it seems that we've gone to [the opposite] extreme."

"Katie Zahedi is principal of Linden Avenue Middle School in Red Hook, New York, which is located in upstate Dutchess County. She is active in the association of New York Principals who bravely oppose the State Education Department's educator evaluation plan based mostly on test scores. Zahedi has been a principal and assistant principal at her school for twelve years. The views she expresses here are solely her own and not those of the district or her school. Suffice it to say that she is a woman of unusual integrity and courage, who is determined to speak truth to power. She wrote this piece for the blog in response to the release of the Common Core test results in New York, in which scores collapsed across the state."

Here's a look at some of the principals who gathered on Long Island this week to be photographed for a new ad protesting the implementation of a new teacher evaluation system. All together, almost 100 principals from around the state showed up at South Side High School in Rockville Centre on Monday afternoon to pose for the ad, which will be published in the Legislative Gazette and other publications next week. The ad is the latest tactic in a grassroots movement that started on Long Island, when principals there objected to the way the state was moving ahead with a teacher evaluation system.

A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production. In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school's budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government--none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.