Fall tasks mount for principals |
On Board Online • September 2, 2013
By Cathy Woodruff
Senior writer
The September “To Do” list for New York’s school principals looks longer than ever this year.
On electronic calendars and paper planners already packed with open houses, orientation sessions and the usual assortment of autumn tasks, one of the first items principals will add is compiling and delivering the 2012-13 “HEDI” scores calculated for their teachers under the new Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) system. (HEDI stands for four rating levels: Highly Effective, Effective, Developing and Ineffective.)
Then, principals will work on a tight deadline with teachers deemed to be struggling to craft Teacher Improvement Plans (TIPs). They also could find themselves consulting simultaneously with their superintendents on Principal Improvement Plans (PIPs) to improve their own performance.
Meanwhile, in their newly emphasized role as “instructional leaders,” principals will help teachers craft Student Learning Objectives (SLOs) – targets for what material students will master during the school year – and guide teachers as they adapt lesson plans and instructional practices for New York’s transition to Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
In many schools, principals will be the ones responsible for notifying students, staff and parents of the mechanisms for reporting bullying incidents under the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA).
All of these tasks come on top of their traditional September work of getting to know students and parents, putting them at ease and generally setting a positive tone for the new school year. There’s no acronym for that, yet.
“It really starts your year off in a very busy way,” said East Aurora Middle School Principal Mark Mambretti, who was named this year’s Middle School Principal of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State (SAANYS). “This is all during the rush of the first two weeks of school, so it’s a crazy process. What don’t I have to do? That’s the question that hasn’t been answered.”
The pace probably won’t slow much after the initial reporting deadlines pass. Once the HEDI composite scores are out, principals could face appeals from teachers who contend their scores should be higher and hear demands from parents who want their children moved to classrooms led by teachers with better scores.
“I’m not worried about getting it done,” Mambretti said, “but I am worried about getting it done well and in a meaningful way.”
Even the most ardent supporters of the avalanche of newly prescribed rubrics, curriculum standards and accountability apparatus acknowledge that principals will be carrying a heavy load – especially in view of the importance of classroom observations in carrying out APPR.
“We had double the amount of work last year. It will feel like triple or quadruple the amount of work this year,” predicted Principal Phil Cammarata of Jamestown, who speaks enthusiastically about the changes he is implementing with teachers at Persell Middle School.
In some districts, budget cuts that have trimmed administrative jobs and hours could amplify the impact on principals. State Education Commissioner John B. King Jr. expressed concern about that possibility in an interview for the SAANYS magazine Vanguard.
“We need to stop thinking of school-level administrators as part of the bureaucracy of schools,” King said. “We have communities that have cut back on assistant principals, for example, in schools that are quite large where an assistant principal may be critical.”
Karl Thielking, a veteran high school principal in Pittsford and the current president of SAANYS, questions whether the new expectations set for school principals are fair or realistic. He points out that the State Education Department has fallen behind on its own timeline for providing data that local administrators will need to calculate teacher scores and act accordingly.
“It was already a pretty unreasonable timeline,” Thielking said during a mid-August interview with On Board. “We are supposed to provide composite (HEDI) scores to teachers by Sept. 1. Now, it’s the 19th (of August); we still have not gotten the 3-8 scores back for teachers and principals, and that is crashing up against other deadlines.” (Editor’s Note: State officials provided growth scores Aug. 22.)
Jamestown’s Cammarata said he expects to devote even more time and attention to professional development workshops with middle school teachers this year as a result of APPR and the Common Core. He said increased professional development work last year paid off almost immediately with better instruction.
He will stress crafting SLOs and lesson plans closely aligned to the Common Core this year, he said, and “the biggest thing is going to be to making sure my teachers understand how much we need to change and how fast we need to do it.”
In interviews with On Board, principals expressed a heightened sense of responsibility for quelling anxiety among teachers, students and parents as they digest the news of dramatically lower state test scores. Teachers and principals, meanwhile, can stress over how their
effectiveness ratings will be calculated.
“There are educators and principals who are feeling very stressed out and very defeated because there are so many 1’s and 2’s on the state assessments, and it’s so out of our control,” said Poestenkill Elementary School Principal Peter DeWitt, also an author and blogger for Education Week. “We don’t see anything but that final number. It’s a very strange and difficult time for us.”
Principals also are bracing for reactions from teachers who will be surprised and disappointed when their HEDI teacher effectiveness scores come out. Based on what he has seen, Thielking anticipates that there will be capable, talented teachers whose HEDI scores will not reflect their true value to their students.
“Some excellent teachers are going to have lower scores. So, there’s going to be emotion around that,” Thielking said, as he shared some candid apprehensions about his own performance in the coming months.
“My hope this year – and what I think this is what we all are yearning for – is to get our focus back to student learning,” Thielking said. But in the midst of disappointing test scores and the many new tasks related to APPR, he acknowledged, “I’m really worried about whether I am going to pull that off.”
Mambretti’s tone was only slightly facetious when asked whether he had calculated the additional hours his new responsibilities will add this year.
“No,” he said, “because I would cry.”