Conflict of Principals : Pressure Mounting to Abandon Practice of Transferring Problem Academics

During the past two years, the principal at a large San Diego elementary school had been under the gun from teachers, parents and supervisors for continued poor performance in handling the school’s many academic programs.

So it was no surprise that, at the end of the school year in June, the principal’s name was among those on the long list of administrative reassignments recommended annually to the Board of Education by top school officials. In contrast to the many promotions and lateral moves, the principal was among a relatively few who were moved to schools with simpler programs and organizational structure for a second chance.

For San Diego and other major urban school districts, transfer from school to school of principals to try to improve their performance is the major way superintendents attempt to hold them accountable for their jobs. Should the change in campus environment prove unsuccessful, there will be subsequent pressure on these principals to take early retirement or consider alternative positions within the educational bureaucracy.

But almost never is a principal, or even a vice principal, put back into the classroom as a teacher. That is the ultimate demotion allowed under California school tenure laws for shortcomings in a principal’s ability to motivate teachers, develop curriculum, boost student performance and motivate parent participation.

Only One Instance Recalled

San Diego administrators, who run the nation’s eighth-largest urban district, can recall only one vice principal who was moved back to teaching during the past decade, out of the almost 300 principals and vice principals on the job at any one time.

And officials almost never highlight their administrators’ not making the grade, even when demotions or other moves are made, preferring to keep the process low-key, because they say both that morale of administrators would plummet and that teachers and parents of a small school targeted for such a principal might object to their role in a salvation project.

Critics both locally and nationally of the educational accountability system--and there are many--say it lets principals off too easy. They say an unwillingness to confront inadequate principals and hold them accountable for lack of improvement, in particular in low-performing inner-city schools, leads to public disillusionment and disinterest in ongoing educational reforms.

“To the extent evaluation occurs at all, it historically has centered on whether the ship is running quietly rather than on whether it is reaching its destination,” said Chester Finn, who was assistant secretary of education in the Reagan Administration.

San Diego school board trustees two weeks ago, in their yearly evaluation of Supt. Tom Payzant, asked that he demand more accountability from principals in judging the success of academic experiments, especially the many dropout-prevention initiatives approved during the past year that have suffered from poor coordination.

Other national critics have said that districts, rather than shuffling below-the-grade principals around and encouraging career changes, should instead tie principals to performance contracts in which continuation in leadership positions would hinge on meeting or exceeding a series of evaluation criteria.

School officials concede that accountability is often flabby and uneven. But they recoil at the idea of harsher methods. They would prefer to tighten selection and revamp educational school courses that prepare teachers to become principals, so that fewer people ill-suited to the many demands of running a school will reach promotion lists.

On the importance of principals, there is no disagreement. A strong principal can galvanize a dispirited group of teachers, stand as a strong role model for students and assure parents that they also play a key role in helping students achieve.

“A bad principal can never make a campus better and can easily make it worse,” said Principal Michael Lorch of Correia Junior High in Point Loma, who supervisors acknowledge is a leader in San Diego’s pioneering curriculum- and management-reform efforts.

A Red Flag

Lorch is visited regularly by Assistant Supt. Catherine Hopper or her two operations managers responsible for evaluations, often unannounced but always with a long list of concerns to discuss and specific classrooms to visit.

“If the community has been complaining about you, that’s a red flag,” Lorch said. “If Hopper asks me about having too many student absences over a period of X months, I’d better be able to show I am aware and have plans for dealing with it. . . . You have to be proactive, and you’d better know your community.”

But Lorch said evaluation is necessarily complex, citing his experiences as a vice principal at high-powered La Jolla High, where demanding parents have been known to bring in their own curriculum for a class whose teacher they believe is not up to snuff.

“Just because a community may think a principal is a jerk, it isn’t always true that he or she is a jerk, and a move to a different school, while it may be necessary, can turn out well for the principal,” Lorch said.

Hopper discovers problems at a particular school not only through staff visits but from phone calls from individual teachers and from parents, and from her examination of the school’s testing and other performance measures, she said.

Employing a ‘Shadow’

“We try to give help to those identified as needing improvement,” Hopper said, “and that includes setting up seminars, working privately with the principal, employing a retired principal as a ‘shadow,’ or even hiring a consultant.

“I’ve had some people, after their first year, about whom I said, ‘My God, they’re never going to make it,’ but they do. And remember, not everyone is ever going to be a superstar, as much as we would like to believe . . . but I do believe in being humanistic, and I want my people to have chances to grow and become better principals.”

Another assistant superintendent, Beverly Foster, said the success of a principal often depends on the right match of administrator and school.

“Not all people will work well in all settings,” Foster said in defense of the district’s evaluation strategy. “One principal may be a good instructional leader but drive veteran teachers nuts at one school, yet work well at another where the teachers really need motivation.”

Sometimes a principal will even approach her and say that his or her enthusiasm has been lost for a particular school and request a transfer, Foster said.

“All these things that we do can work with teachers in the same way, but a principal is that much more visible.”

The system does stop short of demotion, said Kermeen Fristrom, director of basic education for the district. “We look at the principal as a human being, too, and we have responsibility to that person as well as to students, teachers and parents,” he said.

The Wrong Message?

Payzant also chafes at the idea that principals should be moved more quickly back into the classroom, because he fears that such moves send a wrong message to teachers. Payzant has been quietly considering a proposal to pay master teachers a salary of as much or more than that of an entry-level principal.

“Superior teachers are not always good principals, and some only-adequate teachers turn out to be great principals,” Payzant said. “If we want to pursue our goal to keep good teachers in the classroom, I don’t want them to see the classroom as somehow a demotion, or inferior to management. . . . There are status implications, all kinds of implications, for teachers if we start moving principals back to the classroom involuntarily.”

“Some people will say the system will never have credibility unless a certain percentage of principals are dropped every year,” Payzant said. “But I reject that approach as arbitrary because it is not fair to those being evaluated.” Further, he estimated that about half the district’s principal positions have been filled with new administrators since he took over the district in 1982.

Tom Trainer is a former Oceanside principal who took early retirement to run a pet shop and then ran successfully for a position on the school board of that North County city.

“Tenure is good for principals because, without it, the administration would abuse” employees in the evaluation process, Trainer said. “And I think that, if they make you a principal, it behooves the superintendent to go ahead and try to help someone improve. . . . There are degrees as to who is good or who isn’t; it is not a black-and-white situation.”

Asked Him to Quit

Dan Armstrong, an assistant to Oceanside Supt. Steven Speach, recalled one principal during the past 10 years whose resignation was requested directly based on performance.

“In general, the superintendent will move a principal to a different school if necessary and then consider a change in job, perhaps to the central office, or talk about early retirement if problems continue.”

But many critics believe that San Diego and other districts do not demand enough accountability.

San Diego school trustee Jim Roache said that board members, when reviewing promotion and transfer lists, too often do not know whether a principal has managed activities that “fell flat on their faces.”

Roache, who commands a Sheriff’s Department substation in Lemon Grove, said the civil service protections of the school district differ little from those of other public agencies.

“In a perfect world, all employees would be evaluated on their merits regardless of tenure or civil service protection,” he said. “But, in the real world, unless you show blatant incompetence, it is next to impossible to fire someone. . . . No one likes to to be unpleasant by bringing someone into their office and telling them their work is not satisfactory, but the consequences of not pushing quality and accountability in the schools will be observable for many years to come.”

Roache acknowledges that he has seen some principals blossom after being transferred to smaller schools; he has also seen others who muddle along no better than in their previous assignments. For the board vice president, the root of the problem stems from the reluctance of top administrators to be fully candid with those principals who show systematic shortcomings and to document shortcomings on paper.

Common Problem

Daniel Kruger, a longtime professor of industrial relations at Michigan State University, said lack of accountability exists in all public-sector organizations.

“Even people who believe in objective evaluation get nervous when it comes to their own situation,” Kruger said. “The problem today is that we can no longer afford the luxury of allowing people to evade reality.”

Philip Grignon, the maverick superintendent of the small South Bay Union Elementary School District, has changed seven of the 12 principals he inherited when he took the top job five years ago. But Grignon has earned an unfavorable reputation among professional educators for his hard-nosed attitude because he has told certain principals directly that they will be placed back in the classroom if they don’t retire or shape up quickly according to his standards.

“I will put a principal on a ‘help plan’ if I don’t find he or she performing as I expect, which includes improvement in test scores and clear evidence of school progress, and those plans can help turn things around,” Grignon said. “But sometimes I have to admit that a principal I promoted was a failure, and that I was part of that, which most people don’t want to admit.

“All the research shows that districts like mine succeed because of strong leaders in the schools, so I can’t afford to have a single turkey. . . . And for those who talk about humanistic handling, I say that is what I do for my dog when I get home.”

Finn, the former assistant secretary of education, would like to see districts consider principal contracts. The Chicago public school system, notorious for its bureaucracy, high dropout rates and dismal student achievement, will this fall begin putting its principals on multiyear contracts as a result of Illinois state legislative action.

Willing to Try It

“What is so interesting about this is that you can build actual educational outcomes into the contract that will have to be measured” for the principal to be retained, said Finn, now a professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

Payzant is willing to consider a contract plan on a voluntarily basis.

“It would be interesting to try, and I think some principals in San Diego would be willing to be evaluated on that basis,” he said. “In my own professional life, I have lived from contract to contract as a superintendent, so I don’t have a problem philosophically.”

But Payzant said that even a small experiment with principal contracts would be controversial--since it would require school employees in effect to give up protections they have now--and he believes two other moves to improve accountability could prove less contentious.

Payzant would like to see his district’s selection process revamped to emphasize those skills that principals are going to need as school reforms accelerate throughout the San Diego system. Potential vice principal candidates now go through a yearlong process of seminars, formal assessment by peers throughout the county and lengthy interviews.

“I think the seminars now focus too much on the technical side, in terms of budget, legal codes and school policies, rather than on strategic planning, team building--in short, those skills that are not so much top-down but more collegial and which involve listening, helping teachers as facilitators, etc.,” Payzant said.

At the same time, he would like to see his evaluation process altered to recognize that top-down management no longer represents the district’s organization, that there has been a shift in emphasis.

Julie Koppich, associate director of the joint PACE educational improvement project at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University and USC, agrees with Payzant that more effort should be put into the way principals are selected.

“I think that there is not enough quality control in credential programs,” said Koppich, referring to the 44 graduate programs in California alone that offer the required degree in educational administration that would-be principals must possess.

“They reinforce the conventional wisdom about what a principal is, but school reform means that the job of principal is going to become quite different, with more shared leadership with teachers,” she said.