I don’t exactly have a problem with principals having power, though I do have certain concerns. It certainly is not about principals vs. parents, however.

This is really about centralization vs. decentralization, a very old debate in education — one in which the pendulum of opinions sways back and forth through our history.

The best way to explain it, in my view, it to look at the analogies. Those who believe in very strong principal power, authority and discretion see principals as CEOs of their buildings. It’s a powerful image, and one that makes a certain amount of sense. But I don’t think that it is right. Instead, I think that that principals are branch managers or a larger organization. Yes, they need certain amount of leeway and discretions, but I don’t think that they need to power, autonomy and authority of CEOs.

In fact, I think that there are a lot of reasons why principals should not be viewed as CEOs. Among them is the fact that principals lack the kind of experienced senior executive staff to support them and to implement their visions. I prefer the branch manager analogies because it requires the central organization to provide supports for principals, rather than leaving them to thrive, fail or muddle along in isolation.

If you really look at the ranks of principals in NYC, you see an awful lot of young and inexperienced leaders. The move towards small schools has required the hiring of far more principals, few of which enter the system with experience as principals elsewhere. So, how much power and autonomy do we want to give inexperienced school leaders — and at what point do should we count as “experienced”? For teachers, we really look at 3-5 years, at at least. Should it be any less for principals?

Mind you, I think that school principals are THEY key leverage point for school improvement. Doing a better job of selecting them, training them and supporting them is critical to improving student outcomes system-wide, because it is principals who evaluate and support teachers. Just as we know that we need improved teachers if we want better student outcomes, we need to realize that we need better principals if we want improved teacher outcomes.

So, my concern is putting too much on principals, more almost any of them can handle well in the best of circumstances, and certainly more than they can handle when in the early years of their tenures.

Dr. O is doubtless a nice man and has some interesting ideas. But if he is a paid consultant to the same person whom he cites as critical to the process being successful, that’s hardly news.

This is a book tour, dressed up as a policy mandate. One should set one’s expectations accordingly.

Matthew

You won’t find a fiercer advocate than I of the idea that improving education through policy MUST be built around a strong and specific theory of action as to how the policy impacts classroom interactions. I preach all the time that education happens in the interaction between students and teachers, students and each other, students and themselves. No one need to convince me to of this.

You site a dearth of research on TLS, and I agree. But where is the research that reducing class at the middle or high school has beneficial impacts? Heck, even if you DO have research on that, how do you do know that that it is class size that is making the difference, and not TSL? How do you know that TN Star study is not actually evidence the impact of reduced TSL, as opposed to reduced class class size?

When teachers are planning and preparing, grading and thinking things over, it doesn’t matter how many kids were in front of them at a time. It matter how many student they are trying to accommodate, challenge, support, nurture, stretch and all the rest. Why trying to schedule one on one time at some point in the week for each student, it doesn’t matter how many kids are in front of the teacher at a time, it matters how many hours there are in a week and how many total students there are to fit in.

Give me (as a highs school teacher), 40 kids at a time, but give them to me for 2 full hours and you’ll see something different. Give me 80 real writing assignments to assess each week, instead of 124, and I’ll be able to give different kinds of feedback. Anyone who dismisses TSL as an issue must also dismiss how time time teachers put in to their teaching beyond scheduled instructional time, the limits of human being to keep close track of other individuals, and much else.

As for Ted Sizer, Paul Schwarz and Debbie Meier? I’ve been blessed with the opportunity spent dozens of hours talking about the nature of the secondary school with Ted, and one of his BIG issues is total teacher load, not class size at all. I’ve not spoken with Meier about it personally, but I’ve had enough opportunities to speak with Paul (Debbie’s co-principal at CPESS) and Ted together, and learned that one of the their own long conversations together has been about the limits of TSL, something far more important to either of them than class size. In fact, I believe that Paul has convinced Ted over the years that teachers can handle 80, as opposed to the 60 he had previously favored. To hear Paul tell it, the key to small classes at the secondary level is actually that it is the means by which the goal of smaller TSL can be achieved.

So, here’s my question for you:

Do you think that holding a middle/high school teachers’ total scheduled instructional time and TSL constant, but dividing the time and students differently so that students are in smaller classes for less time, would outcomes improve at all?

And if you hold total scheduled instructional time and class size constant, but reduce TSL, would outcomes improve at all?

Reducing a teacher’s student load to 80 would make very little difference if that was the class size. And there is no evidence in the research that reducing teaching load without reducing class size makes a whit of difference. Finally, Ted Sizer and Debbie Meier talked about smaller classes as a necessary component of their small schools as well.

Too bad Gates, New Visions, etc. and all the corpocrats left that essential part out of the equation.

Ted Sizer, Debbie Meier and Paul Schwarz have been talking about this for a long time. This goes to the idea of every children being known well by at least one adult, and whether teachers have time to know a signficant fraction of their students well.

I’m all in favor of lowering total student load. In fact (Leonie), I think that this is MUCH more important than than class size. Give a high school teacher just as many students at a time, but for longer and with fewer clases, and I think we’ll see much more personalization of education. Smaller classes with more classes for each teacher, so that Total Student Load is unchanged, won’t results and significant changes. (Obviously, at the primary level STL and class size tend very much to be the same thing. However, at the middle and high school level, the connection is not nearly as strict.)

But I have a problem with Ouchi’s methodology. Or, at least, I have a lot of questions. I read the Reason.org interview Maura links to, and it raises more questions than it answers.

* Which teachers is he including in his averaging? Is he including resource room? Special education? Any other kind of special services? Is he including gym/PE, which has different class size requirements?

* Do his calcluations include all schools? Which schools did he include to get to his average of 88? And which to get to 111?

* Why average, and which average does he mean? Is this a mean, or a median? As it doesn’t actually say, I assume that it is mean, when median truly seems like the best measure. So, why is he using mean?

* What % of schools that controlled their own budgets as he want had TSL’s no lower than that of the the city average?

* Perhaps the most meaning numbers would let us know who this impacts students. Something like, if you weight averages by students, so that we learned something about the average TSL of all students x classes. That is, look at every class on every kid’s schedule. Figure out the TSL for each student’s teacher for each class, and average all of those together, so that large classes — which impact more kids — are weighted more heavily. (What am I talking about? Well, imagine two teacher, each with 5 clasess, but one with 10 kids/class and the other with 25 kids/class. If you average by teacher, you get an average TSL of 88. But if you weight your average by class size, you get 103. Giving a small number of kids dramatically smaller classes can lower a school’s average TSL quite a bit without impacting most students.)

The easiest way to reduce the total student load? Reduce class size – which the administration refuses to do. 86% of principals say they are unable to provide a quality education because of excessive class sizes. The main impediments, they say? Lack of space, lack of control over enrollment, and/or lack of funding.

He’s a supporter of Bloomberg, and a former adviser of Klein. As such, anything he says has to be viewed as suspect. Personally, not only has the number of students I teach gone UP since the BloomKlein takeover, but I have about 3 times the paperwork per child than I did 8 years ago. TANs, portfolios, ARIS, data ad nauseum….