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More New York City principals signed on to a statewide petition opposing new teacher evaluations at a time when tension over the evaluations mounted locally.

Nearly 100 city principals have signed the two-month-old petition, along with more than 1,000 principals from other school districts. The tally of city signatories is up significantly from 30 a month ago and just two in the weeks after the petition launched, when it had already garnered signatures from hundreds of schools leaders across the state.

The participation rate is far lower in the city than in the rest of the state. Overall, more than a quarter of principals have lent their support to a paper arguing that the state’s evaluation requirements — which require a portion of teachers’ ratings to be based on their students’ test scores — are unsupported by research, prone to errors, and too expensive at a time of budget cuts.

But it is still a cause for celebration for the two Long Island principals who started the petition in November.

“Support among our New York City colleagues has increased notably these past few weeks!” they wrote in an update to supporters sent late Tuesday. (more…)

City principals are increasingly unhappy with their jobs, according to the union that represents them.

In the latest newsletter from the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, President Ernest Logan reported that 73 percent of union members are not happy with their workload, compensation, and job security. That’s up from 68 percent the last time the union surveyed its members, in 2009.

The survey of CSA members was conducted by Global Strategy Group in September and October, according to Chiara Coletti, a union spokeswoman. She said assistant principals and other administrators in the union were less dissatisfied, leading to an overall dissatisfaction rate of 59 percent. In 2009, that number was 48 percent.

In recent years, principals have seen their role shift from setting a vision and strategy for instruction to managing a seemingly unending list of procedural tasks. In his first communication with principals in April, Chancellor Dennis Walcott promised to cut down on their paperwork load, and in November he outlined steps that he said would cut down time spent on administrative tasks by an hour a day.  (more…)

Long before there were federally funded “turnaround” schools, Nyree Dixon was turning around Brooklyn’s P.S. 12. When she became the Brownsville school’s principal in 2006, barely a fifth of the elementary school’s students were passing state exams and the school was being considered for closure.

Since then, P.S. 12 has seen a jump in test scores and has stayed off the city’s list of schools on the chopping block. Dixon attributes the improvement to changes in the school’s culture and instructional practices.

She joined Deidre DeAngelis, principal of New Dorp High School on Staten Island, on a panel during the conference on alternatives to school closures that several advocacy groups organized Saturday. The pair discussed the strategies they used to help their once-failing schools stay open and, in New Dorp’s case, turn into a model of successful school improvement for the city and federal education departments.

Those strategies — adding tutoring, offering more teacher training, connecting students and teachers, and engaging families — predate the structural and human capital changes the Obama administration has mandated for failing schools. They suggest that strong leadership is enough to change a school’s course — a view that a top Department of Education deputy shared at Saturday’s conference.

“Nothing that happens in Tweed is going to move student achievement as much as 95 percent of things that happen in a school building,” said Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor in charge of closing and opening schools. (more…)

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…)

With just weeks before students and teachers disperse for the summer, principals are still without any official word of how much money they’ll be working with next year.

“No word of budget at this point. Not even summer school. I have no idea what’s going [on],” said a high school principal, who reported being told originally that the budget would arrive at the end of May, and then the first week of June. “I have no idea on what next year looks like at this point.”

Every year, the city enters a budget for each school into Galaxy, the Department of Education’s budgeting data system. Principals use the system to allocate those funds for the next year according to their needs and also city, state, and federal regulations.

But because of up-in-the-air negotiations over the city’s budget, which are centering on Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to lay off 4,100 teachers, school-level budgets haven’t yet been uploaded. That means principals don’t know even how many teachers they will be able to afford next year.

Last year, principals received their budget June 2 — and that was late, then-Chancellor Joel Klein told principals at the time. “Even though Albany has yet to pass its own budget, we can wait no longer to release school budgets,” Klein said. “We know you need as much time as possible to decide how best to spend the dollars available to your school.” (more…)

Principals who worried that new, toughened state math and English exams would hurt their performance reviews had good reason: Far fewer principals earned high marks from the city last year.

Data on principals’ performance ratings, which GothamSchools obtained through a Freedom of Information Law request, show that the number of principals who “substantially exceed” expectations fell by roughly 60 percent from 2009 to 2010. (A full list of all principals and how they scored is at the end of this post.)

The decrease parallels a drop in test scores and fewer schools earning “A” grades on their progress reports. The percentage of elementary and middle schools to get A’s on their city-issued report cards fell from 84 to 25 percent — a drop precipitated by more students failing the exams and the city grading schools on a curve.

With fewer principals earning the city’s highest rating, more fell into the middle. Principals can earn one of five ratings: does not meet expectations, partially meets, meets, exceeds, or substantially exceeds. The number of principals rated as “exceeding” expectations rose from 465 to 608 and the number who “meet” expectations climbed from 114 to 376.

The number of principals earning substandard marks also rose. In 2009, only five principals were rated “does not meet” expectations, but that number more than quadrupled to 21 in 2010. Even with the increase, the percentage of principals earning the lowest rating is now only 1.4 percent of the 1449 on the city’s list. (more…)

A high school that is slated to close just lost its second principal in a year, and community members are agitating to play a stronger role in selecting their next leader.

Katherine Kefalas, the embattled interim acting principal of Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School, was removed yesterday, Department of Education officials confirmed, and a new interim principal, Ronald Wells, was named.

Students and teachers say Kefalas, who had shepherded South Shore High School in the final months before it closed, was never a good fit for Robeson and wasn’t giving the school what it needed to improve.

“We needed someone strong, passionate, and committed, who believed in our community and our students and had experience to stand on,” said Stefanie Siegel, a longtime Robeson teacher. “She had none of this and to make it worse she was afraid, defensive, and didn’t listen or respect the knowledge, history, and experience here. … She was not the right person for Robeson and that was obvious from the minute she stepped in the building.”

But they are also saying that want more control over who their next principal will be. “We don’t want an inexperienced principal to take over a school in crisis,” 10 members of the school’s student government wrote in a statement. (more…)

The vast majority of city principals say they’re happy with the support they get from the Department of Education, according to the latest results of the city’s survey of school leaders. But the number of contented principals has slipped.

Nearly three-quarters of principals reported feeling satisfied or very satisfied with how the city helps them do their jobs on the most recent survey, which was given in November. That’s a six percentage point drop from last April, the last time the survey was administered, and it’s the lowest level since the city began surveying school leaders in 2007.

The survey also shows a dip in principals’ satisfaction with former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein during his last year in office. The number of principals happy with Klein’s leadership in boosting student achievement fell by 10 percentage points between November 2009 and 2010, with smaller numbers reporting satisfaction with his record with regards to school resources, oversight and curriculum as well.

Principals answered the questionnaire in November and December 2010, just after Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Klein’s surprise resignation from the DOE and the appointment of new Chancellor Cathie Black. (more…)

A delay in special education reforms is the first sign that plans laid out before Chancellor Cathie Black’s arrival might not be carried out as intended.

The Department of Education was supposed to expand changes to special education from 260 schools system-wide this fall. But that plan has been pushed back to 2012, Black told principals in an email earlier this week. The move was first reported by Insideschools, which reported that special education advocates said the city would not have been able to scale up the changes successfully on its original timeline.

The slowdown is notable because it marks Black’s first departure from the script set out for her by her predecessor, Joel Klein. Since being appointed chancellor, Black has largely indicated that she will stay Klein’s course. In her previous “Principals Weekly” emails, she expressed commitments to many of Klein’s priorities, last week inviting more schools to join the Innovation Zone he launched last year.

The special education expansion plan was ambitious from the start. An internal review completed in July 2009 called for substantial reforms. But by February, when the city began explaining its plans to special education advocates, few details had been fleshed out. Changes to state special education requirements and unanswered questions about funding are contributing to the delay, Insideschools reported.

Black’s complete email to principals is below. (more…)