See? The NYC Department of Education really does listen to the public when they start saying the "Leadership Academy" principals were no good. Now, we have Summer Principals Academy, the Principal training at Relay Graduate School, etc.....
please contact Mark Rush, Executive Director of the Principal Pipeline Strategy, at MRush2@schools.nyc.gov
Lots of new wonderful programs to churn out warm and fuzzy principal people.
Not.
Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
NYC Approach to Leadership
Our Approach
In order to increase the number of
high-quality candidates who are well-prepared to become principals in New York
City's public schools, we are seeking talented educators at earlier points in
their careers. Our goals are to:
·
Nurture these
individuals’ leadership skills while they remain in teaching roles
·
Develop a strong and
sustainable leadership pipeline for our City's schools.
About the Leadership Pipeline
The New York City
Department of Education is committed to creating and sustaining a rich,
thoughtful, and robust leadership pipeline process, which
includes identifying and nurturing talented educators early in their
careers, strengthening existing principal preparation programs, and developing
new partnerships.
The pipeline structure has systemic supports and effective leadership development programs at each stage to identify and cultivate:
The pipeline structure has systemic supports and effective leadership development programs at each stage to identify and cultivate:
- Strong teachers to meet
the citywide instructional expectations and move into more formal teacher
leadership development programs;
- Effective teacher leaders
and assistant principals to move into principal pipeline
programs and then into principal positions;
- Quality support for novice
principals; and
- Opportunities for experienced
principals to mentor aspiring leaders.
New York City was one of six urban school districts in the United States selected by the Wallace Foundation to participate in its $75 million, five-year Principal Pipeline Initiative. This grant has informed our efforts to reassess our existing leadership pipeline and to strengthen it with an emphasis on teacher leadership and school leadership roles. The other selected school districts include: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Denver Public Schools, Gwinnett County Public Schools, Hillsborough County Public Schools, and Prince George's County Public Schools.
The DOE is committed to sustaining proven, effective strategies. We look forward to continuing our long-time partnership with The Wallace Foundation and others who support this work as we build and strengthen our leadership development and career opportunities.
 |
Students at the Teachers College Summer Principals Academy recently worked on their final project: designing a new school. Their program is one of a handful the city has decided to partner closely with as it aims to train more high-quality principals.
( Photo by Patrick Wall ) |
Leadership and management often require distinct and complementary skill sets, and are both critical to the leadership development process. The resources below have been identified as helpful guides to support current and aspiring leaders.
Commonly Used Authors and TextsSchool Leadership:
Teamwork:
Adaptive Leadership:
Change Leadership:
Emotional Intelligence:
Learning Organizations:
Management:
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| Mark Rush |
Mark Rush
Executive Director of Principal Pipeline Strategy at NYC Department of Education
Experience
Executive Director of Principal Pipeline Strategy
NYC Department of Education
Erica Zigelman has watched from up close as the city’s approach to preparing school leaders has evolved over the past decade.
In 2005, she was in the second graduating class of the NYC Leadership Academy, the fast-track principal training program with a paid yearlong residency, which the Bloomberg administration created to mold a new corps of leaders to carry out its policies.
Today, Zigelman still heads the Washington Heights middle school she founded after her training, even as the city relies less on the academy to train principals like her. But she now mentors aspiring principal-assistant principal pairs and rising teacher-leaders who are in new training programs meant to prepare the next generation of school leaders.
“It’s all about the pipeline,” said Zigelman, who spent two decades in the school system before founding M.S. 322. “You’ve always got to look for your up-and-coming leaders.”
The Leadership Academy
was designed to fill gaps left by the city’s longstanding process to become a
principal, in which educators work their way up within schools over time. But
with about 200 principal slots to fill each year, the city has recognized the
need to branch out beyond its boutique principal-training academy.
Fueled by a $12.5
million grant, the city has lately adopted what one recent report called
an “all-of-the-above” approach: It has found less costly ways to prepare
principals on its own and to seek out potential leaders earlier in their
careers, while at the same time working more closely than ever with hand-picked
training partners, which are also trying out new strategies.
Meanwhile, Chancellor
Carmen Fariña, a former principal, has proclaimed her vision of school leader
as master teacher and collaborator-in-chief. But apart from a shift in the principal-eligibility
rules, it remains to be seen how her thoughts on the role of school
leaders will affect how they are trained.
“I ask myself that
question every night,” said Joshua Thompson, the executive director of the New
York City and Newark office of New Leaders, one of the city’s training
partners. “It’s definitely to-be-determined.”
Former Chancellor Joel
Klein launched the Leadership Academy a decade ago to fill a surge of expected
school vacancies with principals trained to apply a corporate-minded focus on
data and results to school management.
But starting with its
first class of 77 graduates in 2004, the academy has never produced enough
principals to replace all those who leave the system. And because of the
academy’s steep cost — its students pull in administrator salaries while
training under mentor principals — the city has paid for fewer and fewer
participants, down to just 20 this year.
The city has also
driven down costs by creating its own principal training program, which relies
on the Leadership Academy for curriculum and recruitment support, but has
participants keep their jobs in their own schools rather than apprentice
elsewhere. It has also reduced the Leadership Academy’s residency from a full
to a half-year.
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| New York City district school teachers attended a recent training for current principals run by the Relay Graduate School of Education. With the city’s support, the school recently launched a new program for aspiring principals. |
To draw even more
quality principal candidates into the system, the city in recent years has
decided to work more closely with outside training groups.
After scrutinizing
different programs, city officials chose to partner with three universities and
two nonprofits, New Leaders and the Leadership Academy, out of about two dozen
such programs that operate in the city. It also encouraged the Relay GraduateSchool of Education, a new institute with
strong ties to the charter-school sector that had previously only trained
teachers, to pilot a program for aspiring principals.
The city has helped
the programs recruit promising principal candidates, pay for some of their
costs and for some students’ tuition, tailor their courses to the city’s needs,
and find placements for their graduates. It has pushed them to tie their
admissions criteria, curriculums, and assessments to the city’sQuality Review rubric,
which is used to rate schools and principals.
Kenneth Grover of Bank
Street College said the city’s outreach has spurred the school to share
training ideas with the other partner institutions, Fordham University and
Teachers College. And it has given the school a clearer sense of the city’s
expectations for principals.
“We have a greater
understanding of what’s being done and why,” said Grover, chair of the school’s
educational leadership department, “which has given us more time to integrate
it into our program.”
Much of the
department’s work with the partners is funded by a multi-year grant it
was awarded in 2011 by the Wallace Foundation, a New York-based philanthropy
that helped fund the launch of the Leadership Academy.
The grant stipulates
that a significant number of graduates from the city’s revamped training
programs or its partners’ must be heading schools by January 2015. Those programs
currently have 229 participants, according to the city.
The principals will be
evaluated using the city’s new online database, which can match administrators
with school data, such as teacher-retention rates, attendance, and student test
scores, according to Jody Spiro of the Wallace Foundation.
Soon, the foundation
will ask the city to focus its improvement efforts on the principal-training
groups it did not choose as partners, according to Spiro, Wallace’s director of
education leadership.
“The objective is to
raise the quality of all the preparation programs,” she said.
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| Principals from around the country gathered in New York for Relay’s intensive summer training course. |
The city and its
partners have also started over the past few years to seek out exceptional
educators before they are ready to run their own schools. The education
department, New Leaders, and the Leadership Academy now offer programs that let
teachers, instructional coaches, and assistant principals sharpen their
leadership skills without committing to become principals.
The moves are partly
an effort to catch potential leaders who might not have considered running a
school. But they are also an acknowledgement that the Leadership Academy and
other fast-track trainings, which initially let some teachers leap from the
classroom into the principal position without experience managing adults, left
some unprepared for the job.
“At the beginning,
there was a trend of, ‘Look, the system is broken and we just want to get new
people in there,’” said Verta Maloney, New Leaders’ managing director of
programs. “That really doesn’t work.”
Fariña responded to
concerns about unprepared principals during her first month on the job, when
she said that aspiring school leaders now need seven years of in-school
experience instead of three. The policy change drew gasps and then cheers at the principals meeting where she
announced it.
In fact, department
officials had already checked and found that only a handful of aspiring
principals would not meet the new requirements. At New Leaders, for instance,
the average would-be principal today has worked in schools for about eight
years, Maloney said. And at the Leadership Academy, only one person in last
year’s 22-person cohort would have fallen short of the seven-year requirement, according
to its director.
More significant may
be Fariña’s call for principals to spark cooperation among educators, which has
inspired a new school-partnering program and
provisions in the new teachers contract that require joint
teacher-administrator committees. Irma Zardoya, CEO of the Leadership Academy,
said she had “talked a lot” with Fariña about the need for principals to
“create shared decision-making in their schools.”
Jody Spiro of the
Wallace Foundation said Fariña’s emphasis on collaboration is backed by research, with
the most successful schools having high levels of “collective leadership.” The
challenge is training future principals to foster those conditions, she added.
“What’s critical is
that these themes of Carmen’s get translated into the preparation programs,”
she said.
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