School Leadership
I find the information interesting, in general, and was pleased to see that Cathy Thompson, the principal at Rainier View Elementary, will be the new principal at Roxhill Elementary. I have heard very good things about Cathy and am happy to see her stay as a principal in the Seattle School District despite the closure of her school.
On Charlie's CACIEE post, he mentioned something about the principal leadership training the district was doing. One of the groups Seattle Public Schools is working with is the Center for Educational Leadership (CEL) at UW. I don't know the specifics about their work with Seattle principals, but the partnership prospectus posted on the CEL website looks interesting.
The principal's job is so important, and increasingly difficult, in the current education reform climate. I would like to see the district continue to focus resources on the recruitment, hiring and professional development of school principals. I would also like to see incentives (in pay, perks, etc.) for principals and teachers who choose to work at schools that are struggling academically.
A few interesting articles about the job of a public school principal:
- Research Roundup 19, 4 - Distributed Leadership (Clearinghouse on Educational Policy and Management)
Every principal, in moments of stress, has thought, "This job is impossible!"
Increasingly, researchers and policymakers are voicing the same sentiment. The expectations have always been formidable, but twenty years of school reform have stuffed the principal's job jar with new chores and have undermined comfortable old assumptions about the nature of school leadership.
In response, some analysts have concluded that the common ideal of a heroic leader is obsolete. In their view, the task of transforming schools is too complex to expect one person to accomplish single-handedly. Accordingly, leadership should be distributed throughout the school rather than vested in one position.
- Principal leadership drives middle school reform in Louisville (middleweb.com)
For some principals who began running schools many years ago, the new focus on instructional leadership skills has been a job-altering experience. Stuart Watts, a 25-year principal who's been at Barret Middle School for the last three years, admits that he's undergoing a real change in his thinking about his work."I don't think I could claim that I have been an instructional leader in the past. When I became a principal, that's not what we were expected to be."
In Alvarado's eyes, principals were the change agents – “the most important actors on the stage of a school system.” To improve academic performance across the district, Alvarado believed in demanding constant improvement from every classroom, a responsibility he believed should be exercised by principals. “The primary purpose of a principal in a school is to lead the improvement of instruction in a school. Not to manage a school,” he said.
Comments
In addition to Beth's suggestion that principals be given a bonus for choosing to work at schools with more challenging populations, the district should also practice some fairness with principals whose schools are overenrolled. That would mean places like Whitman, Eckstein, Roosevelt and Garfield. Eckstein is bigger than about 5 of our high schools and yet they are budgeted as a middle school. Roosevelt was newly built for 1600 but the district packed in 1700 and there are not enough lockers for all nor enough teachers for all students who want a 6-period day. The district makes a choice when they put these kinds of pressures on principals and then wonders why they are less-than-successful.
I and other members of the Site Council at Roosevelt have been dismayed to find that promises made about finding a new principal were not kept. We were told there would be a wide net cast for our new principal and we find that there was only a blurb in a new educational newsletters and it was a very general one with no specifics about Roosevelt. Even the district's own website has no specifics on the position, just general info on the open principal positions.
I had offered to find a way to pay for the advertising in all the secondary school principals newsletters but apparently it's too late.
If your school doesn’t get a placement in round one, then you go to round two. This is open to all qualified candidates, from anywhere. Those candidates may not apply for a single position at a specific school. As it was explained to me, they want to give both the district and the school community the opportunity to review all the potentially appropriate candidates for each school. And they want to avoid the problem of having a ton of candidates for one school, but none for other, probably more challenging schools. So when you apply to be a principal in Seattle Schools, you check a box indicating your preference for level of school (elementary or secondary), and the type of program (e.g. K-8, middle school, high school, etc.). You can see the form on the district site.
The HR office then pulls together the applications for each level and category, and sends the pile to all matching schools. (My kid’s school is currently at this stage, as are all the others mentioned in the Times article that still have open positions.) Everybody chimes in: parents, teachers, current principal, district HR, and then we hope out of that the right principal winds up with the right program. So far, my kid’s school has had fantastic leadership. We’re crossing our fingers that we can keep the stars aligned this time.
So no, they don’t advertise specific principal slots for specific schools. Is it the right process? I don’t know. I can see why the HR office would want flexibility in placing applicants, and why the school communities would all want a chance to see credentials and references for the entire qualified pool. I can also see why individual schools would want to hunt aggressively for the perfect match, which could be a little harder if you are recruiting to a district pool.
In any case, this is the district’s version of a wide net. If someone promised you something beyond this, Melissa, that’s the problem. The person you spoke with didn’t clarify exactly what was happening. What that person was probably suggesting was that you wouldn’t get a round one, assigned placement. It looks like Roosevelt didn’t. As a practical matter, anybody who applies for a secondary high school principal slot right now is applying to Roosevelt, but those candidates are also applying for other open high school positions, at least in theory.