(Vol. 2, No. 1 - Winter 1998)

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Principal leadership drives middle school reform agenda

Although middle school principals in Jefferson County, KY still struggle to find the time they need to be "leaders of standards-based reform," they say a heightened awareness in the central office about their key role is leading to more support and better principal professional development

by John Norton

Principal Debbie Baker is standing in a dark closet jammed with cabinets and equipment, talking into a box about twice the size of a large refrigerator. It's 7:15 a.m. on a Monday morning and Baker, a self-confessed adrenalin junkie, has already plunged into her day.

She's trying to track down two laptop computers so the Jefferson County Public Schools property department can check them off of their delivery list. The giant box, which looks like a Univac computer from the 1950s, is Baker's communications center. By flipping a switch or two, she can broadcast her voice into any classroom at Meyzeek Middle School.

By 7:20 she's back in her office, but she can't complete a sentence. Her staff constantly engages her through the open door. At 7:22, she greets a parent who's dropped by with some Christmas decorations. At 7:25 she takes a call from a PTA member. Baker listens patiently but keeps checking her watch. Valuable time is slipping away. She works through a pile of paperwork, including a security report about a malfunctioning alarm in the school technology lab.

"You can't be a good principal," she says, "if you can't do three things at once."

7:35 -- The parent hangs up. A student can't get his locker door open. The staff calls on Baker to solve the problem. She explains how.

7:40 - -Baker heads for the school's TV studio, picking up litter in the hall along the way. Student assistants are waiting. Baker immediately takes her seat and begins a 10-minute schoolwide broadcast with the self-assurance of a veteran anchorwoman.

7:51 -- Baker discusses the alarm problem with her technology teachers and observes students working in the lab.

7:55 -- She's back in her office, speaking privately with a teacher accused of using "inappropriate" language to describe a student. The conversation takes two minutes. A traffic jam is building up around Baker's office door as three staff members vie for her attention.

"I'll be with you in just a second," she tells one.

"I need that second," comes the reply.

8:00 a.m. -- Baker meets with a half-dozen parents who are concerned about the aggressive coaching style of one of the school's teachers. After a 15-minute discussion, one parent concludes, "The bottom line is you don't treat people that way." Baker nods. "I agree with you."

8:15 -- Baker returns to her office and answers a few more staff questions. By 8:20, she begins a school "walk-around," visiting the new art teacher, helping carpenters get some new windows up to the second floor, talking to a science teacher about painting his classroom.

The walk-around takes an hour. While Baker has been away from her office, the messages and the problems have been piling up. She tackles them in between meetings with two students who are having attendance problems, and several teachers who need her advice. At 10 a.m. she climbs the stairs again to evaluate a veteran teacher and visit more classrooms.

And so the day goes for Debbie Baker, middle school principal. One task piled on another. She manages a $3 million budget, oversees the physical plant, the cafeteria, the Youth Service Center, the school athletic programs, and figures out what to do when the water main bursts and shorts out the power system. (Organize a fleet of buses and send the children home.) Any time she leaves her office, she can expect to have an impromptu meeting in the hallways or cafeteria every 60 to 90 seconds.

Very little of this contact-and very little of Debbie Baker's day-seems directly related to the work that JCPS leaders, and Baker herself, believe is most important right now for middle school principals: changing instructional practice and raising student achievement.

But Baker and her equally pressed principal colleagues say things are better than they used to be. Part of the reason, they believe, is a heightened awareness in the district's central office of the key role principals must play in pulling the JCPS middle schools out of the KIRIS doldrums, and the kind of professional development principals need to be effective as leaders of "standards-based reform."


New approach to principal professional development

Actually, by Baker's reckoning, this Monday in early December was a pretty good "instructional leadership" day for her. She met with a team of teachers to discuss the school's latest KIRIS test results; evaluated and provided feedback to a veteran teacher; discussed the progress of a new teacher with a mentoring team and the teacher himself, and spent 90 minutes after school talking with other principals about way to promote the group analysis of student work among teachers in their schools.

Over the next day and half, Baker would be meeting with four of her lead teachers away from school, as they attended a workshop on the district's soon-to-be implemented performance standards. During the retreat, Baker and her team would also discuss ways to push the district's standards-based reform agenda at Meyzeek. Principals from two other middle schools (Johnson and Lassiter) would be engaged in the same work.

The retreat, which included instructional leaders from the district's highest levels, is just one example of how JCPS is changing its approach to principal professional development.

In the last year, the district has also: "We're having a completely different conversation with principals than we were having a year ago," says Sherry DeMarsh, who directs middle school reform efforts.


District underestimated principals' training needs

When DeMarsh, a former principal at Iroquois and Kammerer, assumed her post in October 1996, she brought a new awareness of principals' training needs to the JCPS central office. She knew that many principals were out of touch with the standards-based approach to instruction embedded in the state's KERA reform process. "When KERA was implemented, principals didn't really get the training they needed to help lead the reform," she says.

DeMarsh's insight was underscored earlier this school year, when the district offered an optional weekend retreat for principals.

Included on the agenda was DeMarsh's discussion of the fundamentals of KERA reform. "Sherry did something that I thought at first wasn't necessary," says Sandy Ledford, the JCPS assistant superintendent for middle schools. "She went back and talked about the history of standards and why we needed to have them. I (had) made the assumption that people would know that."

But when most of the principals at the retreat made comments like, "Now I get it!" Ledford realized they needed more help with the basics of standards-based reform.

Ledford and DeMarsh believe that the district's new principal development strategy is, as DeMarsh says, "giving principals enough knowledge and confidence to be able to go in and have those really important conversations with teachers that they will need to have to raise achievement.

"They simply won't have those conversations," DeMarsh asserts, "if they don't feel knowledgable. You're not going to ask tough questions unless you feel you're well-grounded in what you're discussing."

For some principals who began running schools many years ago, the new focus on instructional leadership skills has been a job-altering experience. Stuart Watts, a 25-year principal who's been at Barret Middle School for the last three years, admits that he's undergoing a real change in his thinking about his work.

"I don't think I could claim that I have been an instructional leader in the past. When I became a principal, that's not what we were expected to be." With the advent of KERA and the pressure to redesign instruction to focus on what students-not teachers-do, Watts says principals have little choice but to change, or retire. "Schools won't survive KIRIS without principal leadership," he says.
Even principals who have prided themselves on being instructional leaders say the much-improved professional development is making them more confident about leading their schools. "We're getting realistic, practical information and assistance," says Highland's Holly Nolan. Debbie Baker says the additional training allows principals to rely less on outside experts and more on being trainers of teachers themselves.

"If you have credibility with your staff and they're willing to listen to you and see you as an expert, then what you say can have real impact," Baker says. "But you have to have the knowledge yourself, and the time to communicate with your teachers, for that to happen."

In schools where principals are working hard to change, teachers say they can see the difference. Noël Harris, a veteran math teacher at Johnson Middle School (which met 147 percent of its current two-year KIRIS goal in the first year), says principal Linda Miller "is much, much more involved in the instructional leadership of our school than any principal I've ever had before. Now we're really doing instructional things in our department meetings. And I can see all of our teams are getting stronger."


Highs and lows of principal professional development

With so much change going on, there's bound to be some stumbling along the way. Most of the middle school principals agree that last summer's NASSP training was, as one put it, "a lot of the same stuff we've had in the past." The principals wanted more specifics about how to be leaders in implementing academic standards in their schools and found the training "too generic."

Some principals were much more positive about a visit to the Corpus Christi schools. Barret's Stuart Watts echoed the opinions of several principals who visited in the Texas classrooms. In every class, teachers and students could talk about the purpose of their lessons, how they fit into the larger picture of instruction, and what standards they were working to meet, he says.

"I came away thinking, wow, it can be done if you're all on the same page. It emphasized to me that if you change what you ask kids to do, they will respond, and you can really make a change in achievement."

On a recent district survey, JCPS middle school principals reported that they're spending more time with teachers talking about standards and what quality student work looks like. They're getting more personally involved and relying less on others to set the academic expectations in their schools. They say they're more informed and knowledgable about good teaching practice after a year of professional development and study. "It has taken me seven years to get here," says one.

Ann Goins, the principal at Carrithers, and Lassiter principal Fred Harbison are both quick to say that principals feel a bit cornered by KERA and its relentless raising of the academic performance bar. "There's a sense now among principals that we better get on the ball," Harbison says.


Patience with foot-dragging principals is limited

Privately, district officials admit that not all JCPS middle school principals are actually "getting on the ball."

"I'd say at least half of our principals are really trying to change the way they do business," says one. "But we still have some that just don't get it, or don't want to get it."

Assistant superintendent Sandy Ledford says the district's patience with principals who refuse to change is limited. She points to a revamped principal evaluation system, which she helped design, that she believes will hold principals more accountable for results.

"In the old days the peer evalutions were basically rubber-stamping, with the principals signing off on each other's evaluations. Sometimes they just changed the dates." Now, she says, "the evaluations include real conversation and a focus on school improvement."

Even if the district is able to put a principal committed to higher student achievement in every school, the hectic school management part of their professional lives will always be a factor.

"Principals need quality time with teachers," says Highlands teacher Curt Matter. "But the reality is principals initiate things and have a hard time following through. When parents are griping about having too many kids on the bus, it's hard to think about how you link two staff development days in August to standards-based reform."

Debbie Baker acknowledges the problem. "I spend as much time as I can in instructional leadership, but there are a lot of management and discipline things that fill up your day." Still, Baker believes she's getting better at leading change, both through her own personal intervention and by calling on talented teachers in her school. (See our story about the teacher cadre.)

What other professional development would help Baker lead her school toward higher achievement? Her answers reflect the thoughts of most of JCPS's tuned-in middle school principals.

"I'd like more ideas about how to find time for teachers to do some of the work that needs to be done. Time is constantly a mystery-just pulling four department chairs out for two days puts a strain on the staff that's left behind. We need more creative ideas about time."

In a magnet school where teachers are expected to teach "advanced" and "basic" kids, staff friction is an every-day issue. "I'd like to figure out how to create more of a sense of collegiality among staff members. Some of my staff would have a real hard time looking at their student work together or talking about the quality of their lessons. 'Who are you to tell me?' We would really be struggling with that kind of process."

Although Meyzeek has a schedule that allows subject-area teachers to plan together, "we have very little of that going on. Most folks go in their rooms and work alone."

Baker will continue to puzzle over the solutions to these problems as she races through each school day. "I always think I can do more than I end up being able to do," she says. "That's the life of a principal."

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