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Principal Uncertainty
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Alex Gronke
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Last Updated on February, 13 2009 at 12:03 PM
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Understanding principal turnover at Oakland schools.
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| There had been too much principal turnover at Skyline High School.
Albert Sye, the current principal, took the job after three parents'
groups at the high school interviewed applicants, checked references,
and debated amongst themselves about which candidate would be best for
the school. The way Mr. Sye became the principal of Skyline High School
in August 2008 was a model of community involvement, and followed
several years of anger with the way school district officials chose
principals for the high school. |
There had been too much principal turnover at Skyline High School. Albert Sye, the current principal, took the job after three parents' groups at the high school interviewed applicants, checked references, and debated amongst themselves about which candidate would be best for the school. The way Mr. Sye became the principal of Skyline High School in August 2008 was a model of community involvement, and followed several years of anger with the way school district officials chose principals for the high school.
Oakland Unified School District's superintendent is now trying to remove Mr. Sye from the job following claims that he made inappropriate racial remarks to some of his staff, and touched women colleagues in a way that made them uncomfortable. Regardless of what happens with Mr. Sye's job, the fact is that principals don't last very long at OUSD.
A good principal can turn an underperforming school around, raise the morale of dispirited teachers, rally community support, and close the achievement gap that separates students across class and race lines. A bad principal can sink a school.
A difficult job in any school district, Oakland Unified's principals are charged with raising test scores in some of the state's poorest schools. Compared to their peers in other large school districts, they are among the poorest paid administrators in California. The highest paid elementary school principal in Oakland Unified earns a base annual salary of around $86,000. According to the California Department of Education, the state average for elementary school principals in districts with more than 20,000 students was $94,000 in 2005.
Pay is a reason principals don't remain with Oakland Unified, says Marco Franco, who has been the principal at Sobrante Park elementary school in East Oakland since 1997. Mr. Franco says that higher salaries lure principals to competing school districts. But money isn't everything.
The average tenure for a principal with OUSD is slightly less than four years. The average tenure for a principal in Long Beach Unified School District is 10 years. Regarded in education circles as a model big city school district, Long Beach Unified pays its principals more than OUSD - a principal with a PhD and 30 years experience can earn $108,000 a year - but the district average is closer to the state average. The most a high school principal can earn in Oakland is $105,000.
Mr. Franco says that too many new principals find themselves in hard-to-manage schools without the experience or support to cope. For the past three years, OUSD has needed to replace between 15 and 18 percent of its principals at the beginning of each school year. The average amount of time an OUSD principal has been at a school is 3.3 years. And only 35 percent of OUSD's principals were at the same school four years ago.
Marco Franco, one of the few OUSD principals who's stayed at his job for more than a decade.
Troy Flint, an OUSD spokesman, said that the district knows that keeping administrative talent is hard when the salary is, if not the lowest in the area, among the lowest. He also said that OUSD has opened more than 40 schools in the last seven years, and that the attending turmoil has contributed to higher rates of principal attrition. But he said that in the past few years OUSD has found principal pipelines that seem to be delivering quality principals.
Michale Moore manages one of those principal feeder streams. As the director of New Leaders for New Schools in the Bay Area, Mr. Moore has helped supply around a quarter of OUSD principals hired in recent years. Founded in 2000, NLNS has trained some 470 principals nationwide with the idea that school leaders should be focused chiefly on boosting student achievement. The more time a principal can spend in classrooms, the better, Mr. Moore said.
But as any principal can attest, the demands of completing volumes of paperwork, and the crises ranging from a skinned knee to rumors of an impending raid from Immigration and Customs Enforcement conspire to keep principals from concentrating on instruction. Despite those distractions, by building their days around improving instruction, Mr. Moore said, principals can close the achievement gap in poor schools like so many in Oakland.
Test scores show that he is right, at least as far as standardized assessment is concerned. Of the 23 Oakland schools helmed by a NLNS alum, all but two recorded a year-over-year gain on the Academic Performance Index. Although only seven schools made the gains established by No Child Left Behind's Adequate Yearly Progress measurement.
To be sure, graduates of NLNS and similar programs are not the only successful principals in Oakland. OUSD provides seasoned principals as coaches for rookies. Principals in Oakland also answer to supervisors known as network administrators. Mr. Franco at Sobrante Park said that in his experience network administrators are a mixed bag. "Evaluation has been very inconsistent," he said. "Some (network administrators) gave me a good evaluation without doing the due diligence, others were more conscientious."
There's high turnover in the ranks of network administrators, too. Last year, four of the OUSD's eight network administrators quit.
If Mr. Sye does leave Skyline High School before next school year starts, and sources say that he was given a two week suspension and asked to resign at the end of the year, the district will be obliged to hire yet another new principal. There's no doubt that at a school with active parents groups like Skyline, the hiring process will be transparent and open. That's not always the case. Troy Flint at the district office says that the demands of time preclude a lengthy principal search. And then there are instances when parents and students are not interested in looking for a new principal.
These articles are part of the OakBook Innovation in Education Reporting Project, funded in part by the Rogers Family Foundation. |
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OAKLAND
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