Gee, Maybe I Am Bitter

So Newsweek published its "Top 100 High Schools" issue this week. Their editorial slant was about the importance of principals. I've never taught high school, but it wasn't news to me. Principals set the tone at every school, for good or ill.

If you are researching schools for your child, talk to principals - and see if you can get staff members to talk about the principals. A great staff can be driven away by a bad principal and there go the test scores.

Principals are the arbiters of discipline, tone and academic standards at a school. They hire the staff. They collect the data for No Child Left Behind. They deal with the problem students (and the problem parents). Their jobs demand brains, organization, kindness and an ability to bring out the best in people. They need to be amazing people.

The first time I got a bad feeling about my former principal was when I met the woman he hired to teach fourth grade. She was the only new hire, as the just-retired principal had made our school a happy place and no staff members had wanted to leave (uncommon in my old district) except for the one who had moved thirty miles away. Anyway, Mr. J chose Miss W.

Miss W, even though she was a brand new teacher, didn't want any help from the veteran staff or from the instructional coach. She was offended by suggestions on how to deal with her more challenging students. She struggled with the fourth grade curriculum (no, really, the math was beyond her). But she especially struggled with classroom management. She had a hard time keeping track of materials, assignments and students. When a student misbehaved, that student was sent to the (unsupervised) hallway. Despite repeated offers from the rest of the staff, she refused to send anyone to our rooms for a time-out. When she was forbidden to use her hallway method any more, she put the troublemakers in the back of the classroom. Because she didn't understand the curriculum, the group of troublemakers grew (they were all bored and frustrated). Eventually, some of them started eating chalk so that they could throw up and be sent home. And home was no picnic for them.

When Miss W was informed that her students were so unhappy that they were making themselves throw up, she stopped letting them go to the office after throwing up. She made them clean it up themselves. Now, some of the kids were very challenging kids, but not one of them was violent or hateful. They were just very, very, unhappy. When all of this came to light, the instructional coach began spending every day, all day, with Miss W. She was forced to send misbehaving kids to other classrooms (and let me say that every one of them who came to my room was well-behaved, diligent and sweet the whole time). The principal and the district bent over backwards to show Miss W how to be a teacher.

It didn't work, and she resigned at Christmas. I'm not saying that Mr.J could have foreseen just how incompetent she was, but he did choose her. By the following school year, Mr. Jones had dissolved all committees except the one required by the district and phased out many of the things that had made our students happy and successful. He began undermining staff members in front of students. He created problems between staff members and resentment between teachers and his superiors. He, and he alone, ruined that school.

So, yes Newsweek, principals are everything.

And This Is Considered An Exemplary Urban District

WAW is a school in an urban area that used to be a shining example of success. Then came No Child Left Behind, and lots of problem students from other schools poured into our classrooms (mixing politics and education is almost as bad as mixing religion with poltics, but I digress). Our class sizes grew and the percentage of children we had with serious behavior problems grew exponentially. But we kept trying. We managed to continue to improve our test scores.

Then we got a new principal. A principal whose only experience was with middle school students in another (recently unaccredited) school district. The first year, our fabulous instructional coach (that's a teacher who's primary job is to help the rest of the staff become better teachers) covered for him. A lot. She also stood up to him a lot. She was transferred.

Our new instructional coach pronounced the word "specific" as pacific. She wrote e-mails referring to the "liberrian". She refused to create testing handbooks like the other instructional coaches do. She refused to lead staff development meetings (and would often ask me to do it for her). She was not capable of covering for our principal. In fact, she was not even capable of spell-checking his atrocious memos and newsletters.

Deadlines for test scores and staff observations were missed and/or ignored. Discipline became contigent upon whose class you were in and whether our principal thought your parents would complain. Those teachers who were less experienced and/or less competent grew worse - parents requested that their students be transferred (and that's pretty rare in an urban district) to another class. Behavior problems grew worse. Certain classes were falling way, way behind.

As those of us who knew what we were doing began to speak up, began to point out problems before they turned into catastrophes, both the principal and the instructional coach began to hate us. We tried to be respectful when we reminded them or assessment due dates or procedures, tried not to insult anyone when we brought up concerns (like a teacher who called her students "morons"). But it didn't help. Not even talking to their superiors helped - we were told to mind our own business.

So we didn't mention the things that confused us about the school budget. The principal took over, committees be damned. We didn't mention various other unprofessional behaviors. We gave up.


Fast forward to March, 2006:
The five most vocal teachers at our school received letters warning us that we would be placed on "administrative assistance" if we chose to remain in the district for the following school year. The reasons cited included a list of the days we had been absent (listed as "too many absences" even though none of us had gone over our allotted limit), the days we had not filled out our online attendance (coincidentally also the days the computer system was down) and the days we had forgotten to sign in and/or out. Magically, the fact that we were the teachers that were most requested by parents did not matter. Suprisingly, the fact that all of our students' test scores were way above the district average did not matter. It didn't matter that we headed every committee.

My principal claimed it was his boss, who is close friends with clueless instructional coach, that forced him to write the letters. We don't know. Because the five of us resigned. Then the music teacher requested a transfer. And then the art teacher resigned. And then the kindergarten teacher, a fourth grade teacher and PE teacher decided to retire sooner rather than later.
I'm not saying all these decisions were due to our resignations. I know some of them were due to the fact that certain teachers had spent the year quietly resenting our principal and instructional coach and not saying anything when they turned state tests in late.

October, 2006:

We are banned from visiting the school and seeing our former students. In fact, the principal (who, we have learned, has said many vicious things about us to the new staff) says that he will send campus police after us if we enter the building.

Fast Forward to February, 2007:

The principal was forced to resign over misappropriation of funds. The district has been all over the school's academic problems as well, since all the test scores have fallen.

But I'm not holding my breath for an apology.