Principals: Give us our superintendents back!
Principals debate the role of the superintendent at "The State of Education in New York City" event presented by The Cahn Fellows Program.
“Most people do a little better when we know that we are accountable, not just in two years, but in the day to day,” Jeffrey Scherr, who recently retired from Queens’ Francis Lewis High School, said at an event last week at Columbia University’s Teachers College for members of a TC-based principal fellowship program.
“A level of expertise was taken away” when superintendents lost their supervisory role, a principal of a
Superintendents’ expertise is still available, according to DOE spokesman Andrew Jacob. “The superintendent is always available to talk,” he told me. “Principals can also invite their superintendents into their schools as often as they want.”
And at the TC event, other principals countered that School Support Organizations, which principals contract to provide teacher training, provide the same assistance that the superintendents once did, with the added bonus that they are beholden to the schools that hired them, not a set of rigid rules set at central headquarters.
“When [superintendents] stopped talking to me about bulletin boards, my scores went up 50 percent,” one principal said. (This principal told TC that he didn’t want his name in the press.) “The data speaks for itself.”
But Scherr questioned what he called a “data will tell all” attitude, arguing that principals need to be held accountable for more than just test scores.
Some superintendents were guilty of “snoopervision,” or looking to catch principals making mistakes, Scherr said. But when superintendents’ supervision was good, they helped principals head off problems quickly, he said.
“My concern is that the lack of supervision leads to the possibility of failure before the test scores come in,” Scherr said.
The article “Principals: Give us our superintendents back!” was published on February 18, 2009 in “Gothamschools.org” website. http://gothamschools.org/2009/02/17/principals-give-us-our-superintendents-back/
Published Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009