The Union President's Dilemma

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With the recent release of the House and Senate budgets it's looking like the economic situation for schools is going to get even more dire. Add in the fact that a lot of this year's relief is because of the economic stimulus money from the Obama administration, and I'm running under the assumption that as bad as this year's cuts have been next year could be even worse.

It's something I've been thinking about since September, when I officially took over as president of my local. It's been a hell of a first year, and the next two months could be the cherry on the proverbial *hit sundae. My superintendent has been telling folks to expect an even $1,000,000 in cuts--about 13 teaching positions--and in light of the past two days even that eye-popping number could be a case of raging optimism.

The question for local union leadership becomes this: how do you respond?

Consider my local of about 130 members. If we did lose 13 positions it would be devastating to all five of my schools. Morale would be ravaged, and I truly don't think that's too strong a word to describe the impact. Class size would spike, particularly if the cuts to I-728 and levy equalization that are being bandied about actually come to fruition. Members are looking to me to save their job, which is a hell of a responsibility; similarly, drastic cuts to staffing also lower the quality of the workplace for everyone left behind.

The temptation is to look at the contract and see what could be "given back" to the school district to save money. We have 86 hours a year of per diem, for example; that's more than $500,000 a year that could save roughly 7 positions. Given that per diem is extra money, some reason, they're willing to give up the extra for the good of the whole.

Not so fast, though. That money is also pensionable income, so any teacher who is within sight of retirement (3 years) needs that money in their paycheck to bump up the pension that they'll receive for the rest of their life. Giving away that $4,000 of per diem this year not only costs them now, but the difference for them every month of their retirement could be profound.

Or, consider my members at the very bottom of the seniority list. The $2,500 that per diem means for them is Christmas, is the property taxes, is the automobile insurance. How close to the bone would I be cutting if they didn't have that cushion?

Another area that comes up regularly is health insurance. There's a piece of the budget called the "Health Care Authority Remittance" (HCA), which is much better known as the carve-out. This is the money that school districts have to remit to the state to pay for health care for retired teachers, paras, and administrators, and right now the bill is about $60 per month per teacher. When carve-out started that cost was about $5 a month, which lead to many districts agreeing during contract negotiations that they would just cover the cost. Now that it's trebled four times over we're talking big dollars: for my district, about $90,000.

I could say, "OK--you can take that money out of the monthly health insurance allotment that we receive from the state." The practical impact would be that the people who are already paying out of pocket would see their costs go up $60 a month; for me, a guy who already pays about $440 a month out of pocket, that would make it about $500 a month. Those who insure only themselves--the single people, or those with a spouse who has good insurance--could come through untouched, or only paying a token amount.

Or, I could say that all the money that currently goes into the insurance pool could be used for the carve-out. That wouldn't completely eliminate the bill, but it would alleviate it some. The impact of that would be felt by anyone who uses the insurance pool to lower their monthly costs. That hits the people with families and kids the hardest.

My speech therapists get stipends--three days a year--but taking that away makes it feel like I'm targeting a very narrow band of my membership. My ag teacher at the high schools has a 40-day extended contract which pays him an additional $10,000 a year, but he earns every penny of it because his FFA duties keep him going all summer long. I could bargain those away, but that's lousy leadership.

What to do?

It's worth noting that the official advice of the WEA is that you never, ever trade money for jobs. Getting cost items into the contract is always a fight, and surrendering the long-term gain to avoid the short-term pain makes no sense in their view. The jobs always come back--remember, it's layoff AND recall--and while the pain is real for those sent away it's just part of doing business.

I understand that. Economically, intellectually, it makes all the sense in the world. When an organization that is fueled by member's dues money is telling you that the right thing to do is to have less members, that's probably something that you should listen to.

That said, teaching is a relational business, and layoffs hurt relationships. Culture counts, and I can understand the temptation to put the school family ahead of the fiscal ideal.

It's going to be an interesting couple of months.

Read more here, if any.

Why Be a Principal?

Charlene Milota, vice-principal in a Spokane school and President of the Association of Washington School Principals, wrote her final column for the AWSP’s thrice-yearly magazine in the most recent issue. In it she shares her top ten reasons to become a principal:

10) Every day is a surprise.
9) Become a lifelong learner by observing great teachers.
8) Build the kind of school climate you would want to teach and learn in.
7) Support disenfranchised kids—be the constant as kids move from teacher to teacher.
6) Where else can you feel like a rock star while grocery shopping?
5) Hire, mentor and support your team of teachers and support staff.
4) Attend world class sports, music, and drama events—FOR FREE!
3) Play a significant community role by positively influencing parents and others.
2) Impact student’s lives, one child at a time.

And the number on reason to become a principal:

1) Someone believes in you!

This is nice, but as someone looking to enter that job market I need to narrow the field and would like to scare off as many fellow wannabe principals as I can. To that end, I give you

The Top 10 Reasons NOT to Become a Principal
10) Every day is a surprise. Pearl Harbor was a surprise, too.

9) Become a lifelong cynic by observing terrible teachers and not having the power to do anything about it.

8) Work in the kind of school climate that makes Office Space look like Google.

7) Be the constant as kids move from teacher to teacher, so when They start wondering why the test scores are low They can fire the constant—you.

6) Where else can you develop the patience of Job while sitting in on your 5th meeting of the day?

5) Hire, mentor, support, evaluate, remediate, disaggregate, contemplate, and finally defenestrate your team of teachers and support staff.

4) Attend world-class sports, music, and drama events—frequently. If you’re in the high school, nightly. You’ll also be criticized for the ones you fail to attend.

3) Play a significant role in community gossip circles after you make what seemed like a simple, innocuous decision…until it blew up in your face.

2) Have your life impacted, 600 students and 40 staff members at a time.

And the number one reason NOT to become a principal…..

1) Someone might believe in you, but that’s not a measurable quantity under No Child Left Behind.

Have a happy day!!!~!

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week, The Big Finale: Getting Serious About Leadership

Last in a series of articles about the changing role of the principalship. For others, see here.
The last article about leadership from the December 12th Education Week that I’d like to talk about is by M. Christine Devita of the Wallace Foundation called “Getting Serious About Leadership.” It’s a general paean to the importance of improving school leadership, but there are some good points that deserve more attention. Consider:

The importance of having high-quality teaching in the classroom is a given. But we often fail to recognize that it is the principal alone who can ensure that the teaching and learning in every classroom are as good as they can be.

This is a fairly pervasive train of thought that I’ve noticed the past few months; here in Washington State, for example, it’s a cornerstone of the education platform of gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. I think in part it’s a capitulation, because the reality of school improvement is that it’s easier to make one principal better than it is 30 teachers. As a later quote says,

If leadership is in fact the critical bridge to having school improvements pay off for children, we need to understand how to better prepare principals to lead the increasingly complex institution we call school, so that all children can learn to high standards.

Principal leadership begets student achievement. It’s a subtle change in the conversation, but an important one.

To back up the article Ms. Devita uses two different reports: “How Leadership Influences Student Learning” by Ken Leithwood and the exceptionally well written “Preparing School Leaders for a Changing World” by Linda Darling-Hammond.

One quibble I have comes when the article turns to how best support principals:

New York City’s school system has set demanding criteria for would-be principals to enter its leadership academy and to get a job leading one of the city’s 1,400 schools. Once selected, candidates are regularly evaluated and permitted to remain in the program only if they demonstrate required competency at periodic intervals, through assessments using various experiential processes such as simulation and role-playing.

It’s yahbut season. If you believe the blogosphere (and hey, who doesn’t?) graduates of the leadership academy are given far more flexibility than they deserve in some cases, and many believe that the system is reluctant to pull the plug on bad leadership academy graduates because it makes the system look bad. It’s a program that ideally would do what it’s designed to do; I’m just wondering if the evidence is out there.

To all the principals out there, past, present, and future—I salute you.

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week, Day 4: Data Wise

Yes, I know that leadership week has stretched into leadership weeks. There’s just that much leadership!

The recent Harvard Education Letter has an article related to the book Data Wise by Jennifer Steele and Kathryn Boudett. The beginning is an important lesson for anyone trying to move their staff in a number-savvy direction:

When delivering her opening-day speech to faculty at McKay K-8 School in Boston, second-year principal Almi Abeyta hoped that displaying recent state test results would “light a fire” among teachers and spark a powerful conversation about instructional improvement. Instead, teachers reacted with stunned silence, quickly followed by expressions of anger and frustration. It was the first they had heard about the prior year’s decline in language arts scores. Almi felt as if she “had dropped a bomb” on the room. Far from igniting collaborative energy, her presentation of achievement data seemed to have squelched it.

Teachers are defensive about numbers. We should be; increasingly, that’s how we’re judged as professionals and people, and if the powers that be start linking the numbers to our pay then the issue becomes a deeply important one. That balancing act between numbers as a hammer vs. numbers as a scalpel might be the most critical discussion we have as we move education forward, and it’s why every teacher needs to have a good idea of what data means to them.

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week, Day 3: The Instructional Coach vs. The Principal

Type the phrase “a principal needs to be” into Google and you’ll get quite a few different suggestions: a superhero, utterly reliable, aware, a manager, an educational leader, flexible, and so on. Take a look at the ISLLC standards for school leaders and you’ll get more suggestions, like instructional leader and curriculum expert.

Today it’s the instructional leader piece that I’d like to look at, and I’ll work it around this question: how does the role of the principal as instructional leader change in a school that has instructional coaches?

In the December 12th Education Week the article “Coaching Teachers to Help Students Learn” is all about how school districts are increasingly using coaching as a way to increase the skill of the teachers and improve practice in the classroom. In my area the Spokane School District has invested millions of dollars into their coaching program, with mixed success.

As it relates to our question, though, I think that perhaps focusing on the mission of the school rather than the imagined role of the principal is key. If curriculum coaches can help the goal of having all children learn, then the principal should be happy to see them there. It has to be acknowledged too that it’s an impossibility for principals to get into every classroom on a consistent basis to work with the teachers; again, if academic coaches can help, then the principal wins along with the staff.

I guess what I’m seeing, then, is a metamorphosis of the principal from instructional leader to more of a school manager, and that’s OK as long as those taking on the instructional leader roles (here, the coaches) are capable. The principal will still set the tone of the school, to be sure, but it’s the coaches who are going to know better what’s going on.

A couple of pieces from the article that I thought were interesting:

In comparing coaches to other programs that bid to increase student learning, education economist Eric A. Hanushek has reanalyzed data from Washington state. He found that $100 spent on classroom coaches would net student-learning gains “very similar” to those that the same amount spent on full-day kindergarten would achieve. And the gains from coaching would be about six times more than those for class-size reduction, according to Mr. Hanushek.

I would caution any reader to take what Hanushek says with a grain of salt, because he’s certainly arch-conservative when it comes to education finance, but that also adds some credibility to what he says here because it’s rare to find any additional spending in education that he likes.

Ah, but the problems are there as well. Speaking about how coaches are paid (Adams 12 is the district the article is focused on):

Unlike in Adams 12, where coaches are paid just the same as if they were classroom teachers, Dallas coaches get $6,000 added to their teacher salaries.

This bugs me. It feeds into the perception that “the farther away you are from the kids, the more money you make.” Is the workload of the coach more than that of a teacher? Can’t Dallas see how this would tend to breed cynicism?

There’s another financial issue as well:

Mr. Paskewicz, the superintendent, has warned that the district could be squeezed by as much as $6.7 million in the coming school year, mostly in order to pay the growing costs of employee health care and retirement.

If it’s a coach or a librarian, what do you choose? If it’s a coach or keeping class size in kindergarten below 25, what do you do? If it’s a coach or copies, what do you do? That’d be a hell of a survey to see, how teachers would rank order the cuts they’d want in their district, because that would show you how much they value the coaching they’re getting.

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week: An Aside

Some stats on the changing of the guard in the principal’s office, from the January edition of NEA Today:

• Fewer than 5 percent of new principals come directly from the classroom; many now come from central office positions or coaching roles.
  
  
• 54% of new principals are women. Only 36% of principals with more than ten years in the field are women.
  
  
• 20% of new principals are ethnic minorities, compared to only 15% among the old guard.

The stats come from the EPE Research Center; you can find their report here.

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week, Day 2: Less is More. Therefore, is More Less?

A continuing look at the evolution of the school principal. For part 1, see here.

Today’s article is Towards the ‘Highly Qualified’ Principal (Education Week, December 12th) by Joseph Aguerrebere (pronounced Smith) of the National Board, Paul Houston of the AASA, and and Gerald Tirozzi of the NASSP. Three wise men who know much about school leadership, certainly.

Their central belief can be found a few paragraphs in:

We need a nationwide advanced-certification system for principals if we are going to meet national student-learning goals. Such a system would clarify the skills, knowledge, and achievements that set highly qualified principals apart from peers with minimal credentials. Currently, there are no such national standards and assessments.

Why have the federal government take a guiding hand in crafting the standards for principals? Their belief is that the first NCLB act in 2001 was far too vague when they constructed their highly qualified language for teachers; the wide amount of latitude given to the states created 50 different systems and a paperwork nightmare for the Department of Education to have to figure out. A federal role, then, could add clarity.

They also share some of the language on principals that came out of the discussion draft of the NCLB reauthorization that was circulated in November:

…(it) includes a proposal to fund principal training in the use of data, improving instruction for all students, and literacy development. It also would pay “exemplary, highly qualified” principals annual bonuses of up to $15,000 for each of the four years that they worked in a high-need school and provide all principals up to $4,000 in annual bonuses based on the performance of their schools, particularly on tests that demonstrated student improvement over time.

Two bits of snark that I’ve got to get out of the way. First, if principals don’t know how to use data, then that’s a problem that the university programs they went through need to fix (sort of like was talked about yesterday). Secondly, I’m not really a big fan of the federal government providing bonuses to move principals to action; that seems like something that should happen more on a state or district level.

The rest of the article is spent encouraging the congress to put language into the NCLB reauthorization, whenever it might happen, that would begin the creation of a sort of national board certification for principals. It would be voluntary, but the hope is that there would be both remunerative and prestige enhancements for getting the certificate.

I’m curious as to how many principals would take the time, though. Running a school is not an easy task; would many volunteer to take on the rigors of the National Board, especially when you consider the existing demands? Is it worth it to the principals to spend the effort, when they're already pretty well compensated?

To my mind, the best way to improve the principalship is to strengthen the quality of the candidates going in, and for districts to then be proactive in identifying those who don't have what it takes. The principalship should not be a patronage job (nor should any in public service), and those who can't shouldn't.

Read more here, if any.

Leadership Week, Day 1: How To Improve the Principalship

As someone in a school administration program the December 12th edition of Education Week was an early Christmas present, because there are four superior articles on how the role of the principal is changing and what that will mean for the schools that must change as well. I thought it’d be neat to look at one article a day this week, because there’s that much good content to be found.

Leading off is “How States Can Build Leadership Systems,” by David Spense and Gene Bottoms of the Southern Regional Education Board. They’ve written an article on how states can improve the principal pipeline for themselves, and there’s some very good suggestions to be found:

• Be more precise about expectations for good leaders. The administration class that I had this fall was my first exposure to the ISLLC standards; they’re nice enough on their face, but they don’t tell you a whole heck of a lot about what it really means to be a principal. The fine print of a job announcement for a principal position would be a good place to start, if you’re interested in refining what it really means to be a school leader, because there you’ll find 20 or more bullet points about what’s expected.
  
  
• Be more selective about principal-candidates. The point they’re making here is that pretty much anyone can get into an administrative program. The article goes on to say that about half of principal program graduates never use the credential; for them, it was a path to a pay bump and nothing more. That seems odd to me when there are so many different master’s degree programs out there, but so be it.
  
  The article recommends that the schools and universities act as a sort of dual filter; encouraging great teachers to think about taking a step up on one end, putting them through a meaningful, rigorous program at the other. It’s a nice theory; I’d be interested to actually see it in action. Teachers College at Columbia University is a far, far different place than Central Washington University, after all.
  
  
• Ensure that university-based leadership programs improve. I’m spoiled, because Eastern has a superior administrative program. Here the authors say that many principal programs are mired in thinking that worked 50 years ago, that the classes needed often aren’t the classes taught, and what is taught is usable only in the most general sense.
  
  
• Help aspiring principals learn on the job. One of the problems they list isn’t really a problem at all, to my mind:
  
  Unfortunately, many principal preparation programs provide internships in name only. They allow interns to choose their own mentors and schools for their internship sites. Many programs also fail to provide trained mentors who can expertly demonstrate competence and coach others to meet the state’s leadership standards.
  
  Incredibly, one principal testified at an SREB conference on school leadership last year that her internship in graduate school had consisted of her collecting tickets at a high school football game!
  
  Number one, I call shenanigans. Is it possible that a principal intern might have collected tickets at a football game? Sure, just like if I’m able to do my internship next year it’s possible that I’ll be setting up bleachers for assemblies, wiping down tables in the lunchroom, and passing out band-aids in the nurses office, because that’s what the principal sometimes has to do. The football game story is an anecdote, nothing more.
  
  Number two, the reasons most interns choose the site of their internship is because they choose their work site. How else would you have them do it? It’s a very small subset of potential candidates who could afford to take a year off on a lark; is that what’s being suggested, here?
  
  
• Require more of beginning and veteran principals. Adding more rigor to the licensure process is the key, says the article. By requiring more proof of leadership ability and asking a principal to do more to keep their administrative certificate valid, the thought is that you’ll have better leaders.
  
  Ugh, ugh, ugh. This reeks of ProCert, the back-asswards process that teachers have to go through to keep their certificate, and the reasons that I wouldn’t want that for principals are much the same:
  
  
  • A principal jumping through hoops to keep their certificate is a principal spending less time with their school and their family.
    
  • Principals are at-will employees. Don’t like the performance? Can ‘em. Want them to attend workshops to get better? Dictate that struggling principals do so. Do not, however, punish good principals with more tedium just to fix a few bad apples.
    
  • If you make it too hard, you’re going to drive good people out of the profession. That doesn’t benefit anyone.
  
  
  Tomorrow’s article talks about voluntary national standards for principals, so this conversation will continue.
  
  
• Build better ways to find the leaders schools need. It’s the John Sanford model; provide ways for great leaders in other fields to come to the principalship, and train them up on the instructional piece on the fly. I don’t think that you can teach someone to be an instructional leader if they’ve never instructed, so this worries me.
  
  And finally,
  
  
• Provide stronger leadership for traditionally low-performing schools. One of the correlates of highly effective schools is the presence of a strong leader, which makes sense. The difficulty arises from what it would take to attract your best leaders to your neediest schools—more power and more pay. The second is an easy one to work around; the first, given the realities of collective bargaining and school politics, is much harder.

Leadership week continues tomorrow.

Read more here, if any.