According to an Education Week report, superintendents expressed concerns that Secretary Arne Duncan’s plans to turn around low-performing schools that call for the firing of principals could delay progress and make principal recruitment even harder than it already is.

Why a two year window?

Questions arose about the magic two-year target for making progress. One superintendent wanted to know why he would have to fire principals who were actually making progress.

They are doing phenomenal things!

According to the report, San Francisco schools superintendent Carlos Garcia voiced the frustrations of many in the room, asking Duncan why two years was set as a target, noting that he has some principals who are making great progress at turning around their schools, but have been in place longer than two years. "They are doing phenomenal things," Garcia said, as his colleagues in the packed ballroom cheered him on. "I'm supposed to fire them." Garcia, citing his own experience as a turnaround principal, said it took three years before he saw real change at the school he led, which became a Blue Ribbon school. Making changes in staffing and programming took time, he said. The new regulations, he said, may make it harder to recruit principals for high-needs schools. "If it's going to be two years, how are we going to get people to do that work?" he asked.

Growth Model Preferred

Duncan indicated that the determination of the bottom 5 percent should not be based solely on test scores, but based on growth.

Comment: My concern is that we do not yet have capacity to evaluate schools on cohort growth and we are, in fact, calling schools “failing” on the basis of test scores.

Show me your numbers!

Duncan doesn’t believe it takes five years to turn around a school. He saw schools in Chicago turn around quicker.

Comment: How many years does it take? According to Susannah Loeb's research (see www.caldercenter.org) real progress does not appear until the third year and increases each year thereafter.

The best to the toughest schools

"What we want to do is get the best educators in the country to go to the toughest schools," he said.

Comment: It is already extremely difficult to recruit teachers to work in under-resourced schools. How are you going to do that when you are making these schools targets for termination? The effect is driving people away.

Just do something!

Duncan admitted "We don't have the capacity to do 1,000 schools yearly. We aren't going to do it perfectly, but the answer isn't inaction."

Comment: So we don’t know what to do, but we should fire the people who are supposed to know, the principals.

Why not do what we know works?

Mike Casserly of the Great City Schools suggested that we base reform efforts on what has been proven to work. Others suggested that we know what to do. We just don’t know how to get there.

Comment: Fidelity of implementation has always been the problem? We don't need more ideas. We need to do a bettter job of implementing what we know works. That takes time, training, and support. Under the current plan, principals receive none of the aforementioned.

Seniority is killing reform

Superintendents complained that they were losing good young teachers.

Duncan admitted there are "no easy answers."

Comment: So, let's fire the principals and teachers anyway.