Central Texas school districts losing principals to students' peril.
Raven L. Hill , Bob Banta | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
February 11, 2008
Geneva Oliva estimates conservatively that she saw seven principals come and go while her children attended Johnston High School in East Austin from 1994 to 2003. The faces changed with such regularity that she says she didn't recognize the principal from year to year.
"Every time a new principal came in, they'd come up with a new program," she says, "but the new program was never completed because the principals left. What good is it to have good ideas if they aren't there to finish it off?"
School districts nationwide are finding it harder to hold on to principals as standards get tougher and the list of demands from the state and federal governments gets longer.
Statewide, high turnover is particularly apparent in high schools. About 61 percent of high school principals leave their schools or the field within three years; by the fifth year, that figure increases to 76 percent. Austin's turnover rates are slightly higher: 64 percent after three years and 82 percent after five years.
The district's annual high school principal turnover rate is just over 25 percent, a figure that is on par with other urban districts, where yearly turnover tends to average 18 percent to 25 percent.
When the principalship is a revolving door at a school, experts say, it trickles down to teacher retention efforts and school reform initiatives, which have vast implications for a district like Austin, where the 11 traditional high schools are in various stages of reform, with middle schools soon to follow. Local changes have included redesigning high schools to resemble colleges.
"We know that school reform takes time — much more than one year's time," said Ed Fuller, associate director of the University Council for Educational Administration at the University of Texas. "If a principal leaves within three to five years, the principal's vision for reform is left incomplete. Over time, teachers become jaded and simply ignore the reform effort. ... Teachers believe the principal will leave and all of their efforts will be wasted."
Principal flight at some campuses has been extreme: Johnston High went through 11 principals in 12 years before Celina Estrada-Thomas arrived in 2005, the same year that Reagan High in Northeast Austin had four principals in one year.
Education experts, principals and parents say the challenges of urban schools, combined with high-stakes testing demands, are driving the trend.
Nelson Coulter, principal of Hendrickson High School in Pflugerville, remembers when principals only had to be successful politicians to keep their jobs.
Now, Coulter says, they have to be like coaches. "You have to win," said Coulter, a 30-year veteran educator.
More pressure
The accountability system has changed expectations.
"While principals put stress on teachers to improve outcomes, teachers often do not lose their jobs over low accountability ratings," said Fuller, who has analyzed cumulative state turnover rates. "Principals do."
It's not always clear when principals leave whether they chose to walk out or were forced out, but what is certain is that in high-pressure situations at low-performing schools, they often don't last.
Consider the five Austin campuses that have appeared on the state's list of low-performing schools multiple times since the accountability system was enacted four years ago: Johnston and Reagan high schools, Pearce and Webb middle schools, and Pecan Springs Elementary School. Pecan Springs and Webb are no longer on the list.
There have been nine principal changes among them since 2003-04.
"I'm not saying we want to hold on to someone who is doing a bad job for the sake of stability, but I am really concerned about the pressure that is on principals," said Louis Malfaro, president of Education Austin, which represents 4,000 teachers and staff members. "I think it's crowding a lot of people out of school leadership."
Even high-achieving suburban districts, where turnover is generally expected to be lower, have not been shielded from the tumult.
Round Rock lost five of eight middle school principals in 2006 and four last year.
Rosena Malone was among the five who changed positions in 2006, receiving a promotion to assistant superintendent for secondary schools after serving less than eight months as Hopewell Middle School's principal. "We had an unusually high turnover that year in middle school positions due to promotions," Malone said.
Schools that traditionally do well on the state achievement test present their own challenges for a principal.
"The difficulty with running a campus noted for its top test scores is that the bar has been raised very high. You have to get your teachers behind you in order to maintain those expectations," said Linda Watkins, former principal at Westwood High School in the Round Rock district. "You also have a group of parents who ... expect their kids to be ready for college, and many of them are aiming for Ivy League universities. The rigor of the curriculum expected in a school like that is very stressful."
Michael Houser, Austin's human resources director, said the turnover rates reflect increased accountability in the education system. "The job is extremely demanding and even more so with redesign, high-stakes testing and ranking of schools," he said.
Michael Garrison, principal of McCallum High School in the Austin district, said principals aren't alone in feeling pressured to produce.
"It's a challenging job anywhere in the system," he said. "But the benefits are huge."
Experts: Support a must
To improve retention, school districts must provide leaders with adequate support, researchers say, in the form of well-qualified teachers, autonomy, solid mentoring and protection from community and political pressures.
When Brenda Burrell took over Austin's LBJ High School in 2000, some expected her toughest task to be getting the school off the state's low-performing list, which she did in her first year. More difficult to manage were what she called the three P's: "politics, pollutants and parasites."
The former principal recalled the arduous task of balancing the concerns of magnet parents and neighborhood parents and dealing with "sacred cows ... people and programs that are dead but keep hanging on."
Burrell was removed as principal in 2004 in the wake of a school restructuring plan.
Experts say superintendents must be more protective of their principals if they want them to stay. "Just like good principals buffer their teachers from outside pressures, good superintendents buffer their principals from outside influences," Fuller said.
Others say aspiring principals must become more knowledgeable about the realities of the position.
LBJ High Principal Patrick Patterson works six, sometimes seven days a week. That's the only way he can stay ahead of the 75-hour-per-week job that requires him to be building manager, teacher mentor, parent liaison, community builder, cheerleader, disciplinarian and fundraiser.
"If the individual is not willing to work the long hours, if they don't have a family to support them, if the individual is not willing to be at the top — and at the top, you're alone — then this is not the job for them," Patterson said.
The Austin district has for several years partnered with the University of Texas' Principalship Program, a master's degree program that provides training in campus leadership. The district has also raised salaries 15 percent to 20 percent over the past three years. Pay for high school principals ranges from $100,000 to $110,000, middle school principals make $90,000 to $100,000 and elementary school principals earn $70,000 to $80,000.
When principals stay, the difference is obvious, said Oliva, the Johnston parent.
Johnston's teacher turnover has been considerably lower since Estrada-Thomas' stint began, district figures show.
"I tell her, 'At least we know that you are here and that you care about our students.' Even the parents are finally coming out after 13 years," Oliva said.
Showing posts with label principal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label principal. Show all posts
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Rethinking Principal Priorities of Training
Not surprising that Teach for America and KIPP are partners in Rice's "venture" [insert capital here]. I think Mr. Bracy's comments are well stated. -Patricia
By Jay Mathews | Washington Post
Monday, January 21, 2008; Page B01
Cities across America have long hunted for tougher, better-trained principals to turn around struggling schools full of impoverished children. A major university and an influential group of educators in Texas are proposing a provocative way to meet the demand: They say urban principals of the future can skip the traditional education school credentials and learn instead about business.
The nascent movement toward an alternative path to school leadership is driven by the troubles facing schools in the District and elsewhere as would-be reformers argue that a key to raising student achievement is to overhaul personnel, from the central office down to the classroom. The change also comes amid growing debate over which of a principal's many duties are most important. School leaders often feel like the combined mayor, police chief and schoolmaster of a town with a population of 1,000 or more.
Education schools, where most principals are trained, emphasize teaching and managing children. But organizers of a new Rice University program for "education entrepreneurs," and some top education officials in the Washington area, say an inner-city principal cannot succeed without enough business smarts to manage adults. For example, they say, principals need to know how to recruit great employees and fire bad ones.
Rice, which has no education school, is launching a master's of business administration program this year to prepare principals for several Houston schools.
"We don't want to take a slap at education schools," said Leo Linbeck III, a businessman and professor at Rice and Stanford University who helped plan the program. "We want to compete with them in creating great principals."
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who has stepped up efforts to recruit new school leaders since taking over the 49,600-student system last year, praised the Rice initiative.
"I think this kind of alternative approach to administrator training has tremendous promise," Rhee said. "We should cast a broad net to look for the best routes and programs possible." Rhee herself took an unconventional path: She was named D.C. schools chief without any experience as a superintendent.
Prince George's County School Superintendent John E. Deasy, who leads a 130,000-student system with several struggling schools, said: "We don't teach students one way. Why would we want to train principals in just one way? A public school can have a $5 million payroll and a plant worth $90 million. That is a job for an MBA."
Organizers of the Rice program, funded with a $7.2 million grant from Houston Endowment, a philanthropic foundation, predicted it will attract high-quality candidates because an MBA will give them plenty of career options if they decide to leave education. Candidates must have classroom teaching experience. Their business-school loans will be forgiven over time if they stay in public schools.
Like teachers, aspiring principals generally earn credentials through education schools. The University of Virginia and a few others have school leadership programs that link education and business schools, but Rice officials said they believe theirs is the first such university program without an education school component.
Experts said they expect many education schools to oppose the new approach. But Jane West, vice president for government and external affairs at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said her group "looks forward to following the development of this interesting project."
Jeffrey Gorrell, dean of George Mason University's education school, said there were "some good ideas" in the Rice plan. But he said it was wrong to say education schools teach principals only how to manage children. "A huge amount of the course work and the internship experiences are related to working with adults," he said.
The Rice approach "will increase the psychological distance between principals and teachers, which is often already too great," said Gerald W. Bracey, an education author and psychologist who lives in Fairfax County. "It goes against the grain of trying to have principals become more instructional leaders, not just managers."
Mel J. Riddile, the 2006 national high school principal of the year, who runs T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, said management skills are important, but so is teaching. "Schools benefit or suffer in direct proportion to the amount of time that the principals spend focusing on instruction," he said.
Rice officials said partners in the venture include Teach for America, which places college graduates in inner-city classrooms; a school improvement advocacy group called the Houston A+ Challenge; some Houston area school systems; and the public charter school networks KIPP and YES, which have succeeded in raising inner-city test scores but are recruiting principals to help them expand. Linbeck is a KIPP adviser.
Efforts to retool principal training dovetail with similar initiatives in Houston, New York and San Diego for alternative teacher training. Charter school networks in those cities have set up teacher institutes, some with education school affiliations and some without.
Rice's leadership program will begin in July with 15 candidates for a two-year MBA, plus 30 other students in a short-term course of study similar to the management institutes run by many business schools. All candidates will work in Houston area schools and take classes on nights and weekends and during the summer, Linbeck said.
Kaleem Caire, leader of a foundation in Bowie that promotes academic opportunities for adolescent males, said the Rice initiative could help nudge education schools to provide more business training. Caire said he tailored his own education degree at the University of Wisconsin to include studies in business and urban education.
Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Montgomery County and a former principal in Virginia and the District, said he found the Rice plan "new, fresh and possibly helpful." But he added: "My concern with these business models has always been the obvious disconnect -- our losses are not as easy to cut as in the business world."
By Jay Mathews | Washington Post
Monday, January 21, 2008; Page B01
Cities across America have long hunted for tougher, better-trained principals to turn around struggling schools full of impoverished children. A major university and an influential group of educators in Texas are proposing a provocative way to meet the demand: They say urban principals of the future can skip the traditional education school credentials and learn instead about business.
The nascent movement toward an alternative path to school leadership is driven by the troubles facing schools in the District and elsewhere as would-be reformers argue that a key to raising student achievement is to overhaul personnel, from the central office down to the classroom. The change also comes amid growing debate over which of a principal's many duties are most important. School leaders often feel like the combined mayor, police chief and schoolmaster of a town with a population of 1,000 or more.
Education schools, where most principals are trained, emphasize teaching and managing children. But organizers of a new Rice University program for "education entrepreneurs," and some top education officials in the Washington area, say an inner-city principal cannot succeed without enough business smarts to manage adults. For example, they say, principals need to know how to recruit great employees and fire bad ones.
Rice, which has no education school, is launching a master's of business administration program this year to prepare principals for several Houston schools.
"We don't want to take a slap at education schools," said Leo Linbeck III, a businessman and professor at Rice and Stanford University who helped plan the program. "We want to compete with them in creating great principals."
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who has stepped up efforts to recruit new school leaders since taking over the 49,600-student system last year, praised the Rice initiative.
"I think this kind of alternative approach to administrator training has tremendous promise," Rhee said. "We should cast a broad net to look for the best routes and programs possible." Rhee herself took an unconventional path: She was named D.C. schools chief without any experience as a superintendent.
Prince George's County School Superintendent John E. Deasy, who leads a 130,000-student system with several struggling schools, said: "We don't teach students one way. Why would we want to train principals in just one way? A public school can have a $5 million payroll and a plant worth $90 million. That is a job for an MBA."
Organizers of the Rice program, funded with a $7.2 million grant from Houston Endowment, a philanthropic foundation, predicted it will attract high-quality candidates because an MBA will give them plenty of career options if they decide to leave education. Candidates must have classroom teaching experience. Their business-school loans will be forgiven over time if they stay in public schools.
Like teachers, aspiring principals generally earn credentials through education schools. The University of Virginia and a few others have school leadership programs that link education and business schools, but Rice officials said they believe theirs is the first such university program without an education school component.
Experts said they expect many education schools to oppose the new approach. But Jane West, vice president for government and external affairs at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, said her group "looks forward to following the development of this interesting project."
Jeffrey Gorrell, dean of George Mason University's education school, said there were "some good ideas" in the Rice plan. But he said it was wrong to say education schools teach principals only how to manage children. "A huge amount of the course work and the internship experiences are related to working with adults," he said.
The Rice approach "will increase the psychological distance between principals and teachers, which is often already too great," said Gerald W. Bracey, an education author and psychologist who lives in Fairfax County. "It goes against the grain of trying to have principals become more instructional leaders, not just managers."
Mel J. Riddile, the 2006 national high school principal of the year, who runs T.C. Williams High in Alexandria, said management skills are important, but so is teaching. "Schools benefit or suffer in direct proportion to the amount of time that the principals spend focusing on instruction," he said.
Rice officials said partners in the venture include Teach for America, which places college graduates in inner-city classrooms; a school improvement advocacy group called the Houston A+ Challenge; some Houston area school systems; and the public charter school networks KIPP and YES, which have succeeded in raising inner-city test scores but are recruiting principals to help them expand. Linbeck is a KIPP adviser.
Efforts to retool principal training dovetail with similar initiatives in Houston, New York and San Diego for alternative teacher training. Charter school networks in those cities have set up teacher institutes, some with education school affiliations and some without.
Rice's leadership program will begin in July with 15 candidates for a two-year MBA, plus 30 other students in a short-term course of study similar to the management institutes run by many business schools. All candidates will work in Houston area schools and take classes on nights and weekends and during the summer, Linbeck said.
Kaleem Caire, leader of a foundation in Bowie that promotes academic opportunities for adolescent males, said the Rice initiative could help nudge education schools to provide more business training. Caire said he tailored his own education degree at the University of Wisconsin to include studies in business and urban education.
Michael A. Durso, principal of Springbrook High School in Montgomery County and a former principal in Virginia and the District, said he found the Rice plan "new, fresh and possibly helpful." But he added: "My concern with these business models has always been the obvious disconnect -- our losses are not as easy to cut as in the business world."
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