New way for DISD principals Instruction watchdogs, not building managers, wanted under Hinojosa KENT FISCHER

Publication Date: January 7, 2007 Page: 1A Section: NEWS Zone: STATE Edition: FIRST Dallas schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa has staked his job on transforming DISD into one of the nation's best urban districts by 2010. Essentially, he wants to double the academic performance of students by then. But while Dr. Hinojosa has publicly set that ambitious goal to boost test scores, among other measures of success, it's his 225 principals who will largely be responsible for making it a reality. So the Dallas Independent School District is re-engineering the principal's job. Gone is the focus on campus operations and administration. Student learning is now the chief concern. Principals are to be curriculum hawks and instructional coaches, responsible for identifying their schools' academic shortcomings and devising ways for teachers to address them. The bureaucratic tasks and paper-pushing requirements of running a school are being delegated to assistants and office staff. "The job description has really changed," said Jennifer Parvin, principal at Arturo Salazar Elementary School. "It's my job to go into classrooms and make judgments on how we can improve." It may sound like common sense: making principals accountable for the instruction on campus. But those who study education say that's often not the case, and that's a problem. "In urban districts, principals have typically been building managers," said Dan Katzir, who heads up programs for the recruitment and training of principals for the Broad Foundation, a California philanthropy with a prominent voice in urban school reform.

But merely saying principals must now focus on learning isn't enough to ensure that it happens, DISD administrators said. So they've got several new projects and requirements aimed at giving principals the tools they need to implement Dr. Hinojosa's objective: *Principals must now spend at least two days a week observing teachers in classrooms to ensure that students are being challenged with deep and meaningful lessons. *DISD is demanding an additional 10 working days from principals, days devoted to being trained on the district's revamped curriculum and on analyzing test scores to identify weaknesses in teaching. *The district also has a new principal incentive plan. Principals showing student academic gains can earn substantial cash bonuses; those who don't can be terminated more easily. *The district also has completely dismantled its principal recruitment and hiring process. Now, a greater emphasis is put on a job candidate's teaching background and ability to spot problems in schools and propose solutions. "We really needed to change how principals viewed leading and learning," said Steve Flores, a DISD deputy superintendent in charge of many of the principal changes. "We realize that this is a learning year for all of us, and there are some [principals] who are looking at these changes and are saying, 'This is not my forte.' That's OK for now. But two or three years from now, it's got to be [their forte]." The new emphasis on instructional leadership doesn't mean principals are exempt from managing their campuses. They're still in charge of their building budgets and associated spending, for example. But the classroom is their priority.

At the vanguard Administrators say Mrs. Parvin, at Salazar Elementary in west Oak Cliff, exemplifies what they want in their "new breed" of campus leaders. She spends three days a week touring classrooms, watching teachers present their lessons and talking to students about their work. She said the frequent visits put her in every classroom at least once a week and allow her to see which teachers are challenging students and which are not. One day last month, Mrs. Parvin popped into Charlotte Currey's fourth-grade classroom, where students were reading in pairs. She asked Mrs. Currey briefly about the point of the exercise before kneeling next to two students to quiz them about the passage they were reading aloud to each other. The teacher said that after 30 years in the classroom, Mrs. Parvin is the first principal she's worked for who's put academics at the top of her priority list. At previous schools, she said, principals visited only when they conducted annual performance reviews. "This is the first time that I feel like I've got an academic leader," Mrs. Currey said. "Her feedback is always positive; it's never a 'gotcha' type thing. If the focus in the [principal's] office is academics, then everybody knows it. It's a very supportive feeling." When she's in a classroom, Mrs. Parvin looks primarily for what DISD brass call "academic rigor." Loosely translated, are the kids breaking a mental sweat? "If you really boil it down, that's what it comes to," Mrs. Parvin said. "Are the students struggling with the standards? Are they challenged? Are they on the edge of their seats?" In years past, struggling DISD schools looked for guidance from schools rated "exemplary" by the state's accountability system. The problem with that, Mrs. Parvin said, is that the standard for an exemplary rating is merely passing state exams. And passing,

she said, isn't exactly a high bar. The district's new curriculum and yearly academic goals surpass the scores needed for an exemplary rating. In short, passing is no longer good enough. Like Mrs. Parvin, all principals are now visiting classrooms at least two full days a week, an exercise the district calls "learning walks." At Salazar, they culminate in weekly meetings with teachers in which Mrs. Parvin shares what she observed. She also offers suggestions for tweaking lessons and ideas for fortifying instruction. Fourth-grade writing teacher Samantha Cole said it helps that Mrs. Parvin knows her stuff because the suggestions are well thought out. "She's very research-driven," Mrs. Cole said. "I like that because I'm the type of person that will do what you tell me, but you've also got to show me why what you're saying will work." Timely change One challenge for DISD is that its principals are aging. Almost half have been with the district 20 years or more. (Those principals, incidentally, have served 11 superintendents.) About a third are eligible for retirement or will be within five years. In other words, the guard is changing. In the last three years, the district has hired 30 new principals. So now is the time for DISD to revamp the way it chooses people to run its schools, top officials said. Like most districts, it used to rely on a predictable career path for principals: Teachers and coaches with an eye toward becoming administrators started with entry-level administrative jobs such as deans or assistant principals at elementary and middle schools, and worked their way to similar jobs in high schools.

If they were picked to be principals, they were typically assigned to an elementary school, where they again began working upward, toward middle and, ultimately, high school principalships. Responsibility for selecting new principals fell to the district's six area superintendents, midlevel administrators who oversee all schools in geographic areas. That old model served adults well, Dr. Flores said, but it didn't necessarily mean that struggling schools got principals with ideas and expertise tailored to their specific problems. New skill sets DISD recently created a new principal recruitment program called Team One Dallas. Each year, promising teachers and lower-level administrators are invited to enroll in what is essentially a yearlong principal apprenticeship. When the year is over, those budding principal candidates are required to audition for jobs before a committee of teachers, parents and central office administrators. Before the audition, the candidates are handed a school's academic data, budgets and other information and asked a single question: What are the school's shortcomings and how would you fix them? To answer that question, DISD's new principals need new skills: an ability to use data to spot weaknesses in teaching, the capacity to motivate teachers and articulate to them the district's new goals, a thorough understanding of what kids are expected to know and do, and how to spot lessons that teach those standards. "A standard resume really no longer gets your foot in the door," Dr. Flores said. "We're looking for specific skill sets." The district's also revamped how supervisors evaluate principals, placing greater emphasis on student achievement than on things like running an efficient campus. Principals who hit their academic performance targets can earn bonuses of up to $10,000 under the plan, which was approved by trustees last

spring. Taking all the district's changes as a whole, it's clear Dr. Hinojosa's reform plan is more than window dressing, several principals said. And it's clear that his goals aren't changing anytime soon. "For me, it's a breath of fresh air," said Desiree Marks-Arias, a third-year principal at Long Middle School in Lakewood. "We have somebody [in the superintendent] who really wants us to put aside the hat of manager and go in as teachers. For administrators, that's a huge paradigm shift." E-mail kfischer@dallasnews.com