9486 in the collection
Many Principals Remain at Schools Graded ‘F’
Read far down into the
article and see what Judith Menken has to say
about this public branding.
By JENNIFER MEDINA
When New York City’s public schools received
their first report cards last fall, given a
blunt A through F letter grade, Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg warned of consequences for those
with low marks, saying with a flourish: “Is
this a wake-up call for the people who work
there? You betcha.”
But nearly a year after the report cards were
issued, the majority of the principals who ran
the 52 schools labeled as failing remain in
place. And while Education Department officials
said there had been an “intensive process” to
review leadership in each “F” school in the
months since the grades were made public, they
were unable to specify how many principals had
been pushed out.
Since the mayor made his ominous pronouncement
at a news conference in November, new
principals have been put in place at 14 of the
schools rated “F,” according to the Education
Department records. Three of those 14 schools
are scheduled to close in the next few years.
Five others among the 52 “F” schools have
already been shuttered, and one more will soon
be closed.
Whether the principals who left “did it of
their own volition, or were encouraged to make
that decision or if some of them saw the
writing on the wall, we don’t actually know,”
said Chris Cerf, the deputy chancellor who
oversees personnel issues. “The fact is that
there were real-world consequences in almost
half of these schools.”
Most of the administrative changes occurred
this summer, with the new principals put in
place in July or August. In three schools, the
new principal is an “interim acting” principal.
While the Bloomberg administration presented
the report cards as the best measure of whether
a school was doing its job, the grading system
came under attack from educators and parents
who complained that it placed too much emphasis
on test scores and on students’ improvement
between two years, rather than a more nuanced
evaluation of the school’s effectiveness.
Mr. Cerf said the department was careful not to
use a formulaic approach in choosing which
principals were encouraged to leave their
schools. He said Schools Chancellor Joel I.
Klein met with roughly half of the principals
whose schools received an “F” and consulted
community superintendents and other mid-level
administrators to decide what should be done at
individual schools.
“I don’t think that we would argue or anyone
would argue that merely getting an ‘F’ on a
report card is reason to lose your job,” he
said. “We went about this in a very careful,
responsible and fair way.”
Mr. Cerf said that in some cases principals had
been in place for such a brief time before the
school received its failing grade that it would
not make sense to oust them; in three “F”
schools, new principals arrived in the summer
of 2007, shortly before the grades were
assigned.
Given the grading system’s emphasis on testing,
it would be simplistic to assume that an “F”
indicated poor leadership in every case.
Indeed, in a separate “quality review” by an
outside consulting group hired by the Education
Department to evaluate each of the city’s
schools, most of the principals at the 52
failing schools — including several who have
since departed — were rated “proficient.” Seven
of them earned “well developed,” the highest
mark on the review.
Officials of the Council of School Supervisors
and Administrators, the union that represents
about 1,500 principals and about 3,500
assistant principals, did not respond to
requests for comment.
Judith Menken was an outspoken critic of the
letter-grade system even before her school, the
Muscota School in Washington Heights, received
an F. After working in the city schools for
decades, she left in the middle of the last
school year and now runs a preschool program in
the Bronx.
She said the emphasis on test scores had become
untenable.
“The whole thing got so punitive,” she said in
an interview. “When you ask for help, there’s
no help, and there are so many things to
undermine you.”
Things became more difficult, she said, after
the grades were released. “It was just so mean-
spirited,” she said. “I spent so much time and
energy fighting and arguing with things that
had nothing to do with actually improving the
education for the kids.”
Mr. Cerf said he could not discuss the
situations of individual schools and principals
because they involved sensitive personnel
issues.
Asked whether some principals had been pushed
out of the system, Mr. Cerf, the deputy
chancellor, said: “I can’t quantify the number,
but that’s absolutely true in some cases.”
Of those principals who left their schools
since June 2007, four are working as
administrators in other city schools; 13 no
longer work in the school system; and one is
considered an “excessed” administrator: still
on the payroll but without a permanent position
in the department, officials said, earning a
total of about $19 million a year.
Robert Jackson, the chairman of the City
Council’s Education Committee, said that he was
unsure whether removing principals was the
right way to improve the schools.
“My impression was that the notion of ‘heads
will roll’ if schools do not improve, was to
try to scare people into producing higher test
scores,” he said. “It is one thing to say that
a press conference, but it is another to
actually go through the process.”
— Jennifer Medina
New York Times
2008-09-04
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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