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Principals will soon get back an hour every day to focus on instructional leadership, if Chancellor Dennis Walcott achieves his goal of taking tasks off of school leaders’ plates.

Walcott has said since taking office in April that he wanted to simplify principals’ jobs. But even as he has directed principals to spend more time observing teachers and rolling out new curriculum standards, principals have still had to wade through a seemingly endless list of tasks handed down from Department of Education headquarters.

That list is starting to shrink. In a message to principals today, Walcott said the city has taken concrete steps to simply principals’ jobs. The steps include linking school records and city health records so that principals don’t have to chase down students’ immunization records; pre-populating some reporting forms with school data; and reducing the number of times principals have to give feedback about their satisfaction.

The DOE has also convened a team of officials in the Office of School Support to find more ways to reduce the time principals spend on tasks assigned centrally, Walcott said. And the department is working on making some data systems more user-friendly, including the brand-new Special Education Student Information System, which some principals say has been problematic since launching.

“You’ve sent a clear message: you are passionately engaged in raising the rigor of the work that your teachers and students do, but too many of you are frustrated by demands coming from outside of your school that do not contribute to your core work,” Walcott wrote in the Principals Weekly newsletter last night. (more…)