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I see Polakow-Suransky is still pushing the identification of teachers “after three, four or five years” as promising for the future principal track. This is a big mistake and contributing to poor relations between administration and teachers, distrust of the evaluation system, and teacher retention in many schools where child APs with limited teaching experience have been given power of life and death over the careers of long serving, very capable and experienced teachers.

It takes a minimum of five years to become a reasonably well rounded competent teacher, and probably another five years to develop more deeply the first five years, and surely that long to show you are genuinely committed to teaching as a career. Short cuts and whiz kids are a dangerous perspective for developing leaders who can genuinely earn the respect of experienced teachers, since these leaders are often viewed as driven by personal ambition or a fast salary track, woefully lacking in teaching experience and professional people skills, ideological true believers of some sort, or simply trying to get out of a classroom as soon as possible.

Hopefully, this will be the first program cut when the new chancellor takes over next year.

Polakow-Suransky pleads that not enough experienced teachers are applying for leadership roles. Well too bad, but guess why. If you are closing schools left and right every year and then opening another 2-4 new schools each in their place, that is the problem the DOE created itself since the number of schools has rapidly gone from 1100-1200 to 1700.. Still, it doesn’t justify this flawed approach to developing new leadership.