By Theola Labb¿
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 16, 2008
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee likes to tell a story about one of her principals who pledged to improve student achievement scores by 43 percentage points by the end of the school year.
How? Rhee asked.
" 'I'm going to pray,' " the principal said, according to Rhee.
"It showed me," Rhee recently told the Washington-based Institute for Education, "that there's a very significant disconnect with some of our school leaders in really understanding what challenges they're up against."
Boosting the D.C. public schools' principal corps is a critical component of Rhee's and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's (D) strategy to reform the city's troubled school system, where about two-thirds of its 49,600 students have poor reading and math skills. Rhee has embarked on an aggressive $180,000 national advertising campaign to recruit high-performing principals who have dramatically helped students learn.
"We expect that given where our schools are, we need people who know what success looks like and can translate that into immediate gains in student achievement," said Deputy Chancellor Kaya Henderson, who is supervising the recruitment efforts.
Those efforts are in step with a larger national movement in which public and private institutions are spending millions on training the next generation of principals to turn around low-performing schools.
Rhee has met individually with the 17 interim principals to determine whether they will be eligible to apply for permanent jobs next year. She will announce her decision soon, Henderson said. After that, parents and teachers will weigh in through principal panel interviews. There may also be additional openings toward the end of the year when other principals find out whether their contracts will be renewed.
Employees have scoured Web sites looking for school leaders who have won national awards, and have cajoled prospective candidates into applying with coffee chats on nights and weekends. Newspaper ads have appeared in The Washington Post and Education Week. As a result of all the efforts, the school system has received about 500 applications, more than double last year's number, Henderson said. And they are still recruiting.
The school system won a $2 million grant from federal officials to assist with recruitment and principal initiatives. The money, which the school system has not received yet, includes $1 million to jump-start an in-house leadership academy, which will offer training for current and future principals and other school leaders, Henderson said.
Education professor Kara Finnigan, who has studied principal leadership in Chicago schools, said her research shows the importance of principals in improving a struggling school. "What the principal does is really make sure that collectively the school operates well," said Finnigan, an assistant professor at the University of Rochester's Warner School of Education.
At the same time, the role of the principal is changing, especially in struggling urban school districts such as Washington's. Richard Laine, the New York based director of education for the Wallace Foundation, which has invested $215 million to research and fund leadership programs for principals, said the job of principal used to boil down to being the person with the most keys, keeping order during lunch and running faculty meetings.
"That's all important stuff, but it has nothing to do with instructional quality," he added. "If schools are about instruction and learning, then the CEO of the school, the principal, should be the head of that effort."
One problem in the District is principal turnover. The school system's six superintendents in the past 10 years have replaced about 250 principals.
Gwendolyn Grant at Cardozo High School in Northwest is one of the interim principals waiting to hear whether she is eligible to apply for the job next year. In the meantime, she's not standing still.
In January, she instituted mandatory uniforms and used donated money to buy them for every student. She has brought in researchers to lead training sessions for teachers and created a morning advisory period where students can get college information and SAT preparation or extra help in reading and math. She wants to create department chairs in the school, teachers who are experts in their field who can serve as mentors to their colleagues.
"We need someone who can go and observe us on a regular basis and help us where we need improvement," said algebra teacher Michael Moore, who supports the department chair idea. Grant, he said, "is more education-focused."
Grant, who has a doctorate in education and spent 31 years in Baltimore County schools, including eight years at the helm of Towson High School, said she is more focused on student performance and what teachers need to teach than on her "interim" title.
"You have to keep yourself focused on the priority -- academic achievement," Grant said. "I don't know any way to go about the job but to give my best so that students are not being shortchanged," she said.
She has brought visible changes to the 1,000-student school. Students used to enter the school through back basement doors, but now they stride through the front doors, over steps Grant had repaired.
This month, Grant started an after-school program for 10th-graders struggling in reading and math so that they could improve their performance on an upcoming standardized test.
"Please choose excellence," Grant wrote in a letter to parents outlining the program.
After parent-teacher conferences, she held a parent potluck where a guest speaker explained what the federal No Child Left Behind Law would mean for a school such as Cardozo, which has not met math and reading targets for several years.
Each morning, Grant stands outside and greets students with a cheery "Good morning!" She checks for uniforms and quickly separates those not wearing a white polo shirt and khaki pants. On a recent day, some students rolled their eyes at getting caught, but Grant didn't let anyone slip.
"I don't like it," said ninth-grade student Williams Perry, 15, as he reported to the main office because of his jeans and a black T-shirt. "But she's doing a good job."
In addition to the District, other school system leaders are trying to improve student performance by improving principal performance. Prince George's County public schools recently announced that administrators and teachers in several schools would take part in a voluntary pilot program that provides extra pay for improved academic achievement. Other school systems have considered that idea, and it has been implemented in Anne Arundel County.
In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein launched the Principals Leadership Academy, a nonprofit organization that receives public and private funds to train principals. Since 2003, the academy has offered mentoring and coaching for new and experienced principals. "We're trying to solve a pipeline program," said Sandra J. Stein, the academy's chief executive. "There's more demand for principals to hit the ground running."
Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who leads the District office of New Leaders for New Schools, a national principal training program, said she has offered to help Rhee develop the DCPS academy. "We have a track record for the identification, recruitment and placement of principals," Byrd-Bennett said. More than 55 graduates from the D.C. program work as principals in D.C. schools, with more than two-thirds in the school system and the others at charter schools, according to Byrd-Bennett.
One graduate, Michelle Pierre-Farid, worked at Tyler Elementary in Southeast for three years, and oversaw a 24-point gain in reading her first year and a 20-point gain in both reading and math in her third year, she said. The school received cash bonuses from Rhee and Fenty in December for those improvements.
"I didn't come in and say, 'Yup, 10 percentage points this year,' " said Pierre-Farid, who leads Friendship Southeast Academy, a charter school. "We just worked to make sure the students did well -- and they did."
Database editor Dan Keating contributed to this report.
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