Bloomberg Centralizes Control of Screening of Principal Candidates For City Schools

Teacher outcry against the Bloomberg administration not holding Principals accountable for their actions is starting to show results, as the following article describes:

January 30, 2008
City Centralizes Hiring Process for Principals
By ELISSA GOOTMAN, NY TIMES

The Bloomberg administration is overhauling the way that principals at New York City’s 1,500 public schools are evaluated and selected, taking centralized control of the initial screening of candidates and trying to shake up a system where, officials say, a vast majority of principals routinely get satisfactory evaluations.

The changes come as the administration has given its principals unprecedented power over decisions like how they spend their budgets, train their teachers and educate their students. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has called principals a linchpin of his effort to improve schools, and department officials say this makes it imperative to select strong leaders and judge them rigorously.

With 160 job openings for principals expected this fall, the Education Department will move away from a largely decentralized principal selection process, which officials said too often left strong candidates unaware of job openings. Those openings, they said, were often filled by assistant principals from the same or neighboring schools.

Starting this year, education officials said, the administration will create a centralized pool of candidates for principals who will be judged on their leadership abilities through résumés, essays and in-person evaluations of how they examine school data and evaluate teachers’ lesson plans.

Principals will still be selected by district superintendents in a process that also requires input from parents, teachers and other supervisors. But the candidates must come from the central, prescreened pool. The city hopes to have 200 candidates ready this spring.

Noting that the city’s efforts to overhaul schools “place a very huge bet on principals being talented, capable and skilled,” Amy McIntosh, the Education Department official who is spearheading the effort, said, “We have to have a principal selection process that is on the one hand systematic and rigorous and data driven, and on the other hand open and transparent so that all the talented people in the system feel like they can come out and apply.”

Once principals are in place, they will also face a more rigorous rating system and will be judged according to specific criteria, including students’ test scores. A rating scale of zero to four will replace the current satisfactory-unsatisfactory evaluation in which the criteria were vague, officials said, and the vast majority of principals were rated as satisfactory, year after year.

The twice-yearly rating will be one factor in determining whether a principal is kept on the job. The scores will also be passed along if a principal wants to move to another school.

Ernest A. Logan, president of the union that represents the city’s principals and assistant principals, said he supported the new rating system. He added, however, that he did not find the current principal placement process to be flawed, and questioned the value of the prescreening process that will determine who is eligible to apply for openings.

“I see this as another attempt to identify successful school leaders, and I don’t know if this is it,” Mr. Logan said.

He said he thought the administration was misguided in its quest for a fool-proof formula for selecting principals. “I think these folks really like to have a matrix,” he said. “They like something that can be objective, analytical, put your finger on and say you do boom, boom, boom, this happens. And education doesn’t quite work that way.”

The process of identifying promising candidates for principal is one of Chancellor Klein’s key challenges. Last year, the administration redesigned the schools hierarchy to give principals far more control over how they run their schools, freeing them from the intense scrutiny of superintendents. The city has also raised principals’ salaries and is offering bonuses to experienced principals who agree to work in low-performing schools, as well as those whose schools show substantial improvement in standardized test scores.

At the same time, the chancellor has also increased the pressure that principals face. Last fall, he issued A through F letter grades for each school and warned that principals of schools with low marks could be removed for low performance. That has made their job more of a hot seat.

The New York City Leadership Academy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s principal training program, has had mixed results, turning out some good principals, but others have struggled.

Education officials say that currently, about 90 percent of the job openings for principals are hastily filled with “interim acting principals,” who tend to be assistant principals in the schools with openings or other schools with which the superintendent is familiar. While city regulations require a formal selection process as well as a public posting of job openings, that process was often moot. Few additional candidates besides the interim acting principals applied, officials said, and the acting principals were almost always hired.

“In the old days, the best way to become a principal was to be sitting in the right place when your principal retired or when your superintendent desperately needed a principal in the next three days,” Ms. McIntosh said.

The New York City Leadership Academy, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s principal training program, has had mixed results, turning out some good principals, but others have struggled.

Education officials say that currently, about 90 percent of the job openings for principals are hastily filled with “interim acting principals,” who tend to be assistant principals in the schools with openings or other schools with which the superintendent is familiar. While city regulations require a formal selection process as well as a public posting of job openings, that process was often moot. Few additional candidates besides the interim acting principals applied, officials said, and the acting principals were almost always hired.

“In the old days, the best way to become a principal was to be sitting in the right place when your principal retired or when your superintendent desperately needed a principal in the next three days,” Ms. McIntosh said.