To be a successful principal, Julia D'Amato says, you need to be "a 29-baller." That's someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them.
That's someone who can juggle 29 balls at the same time, not dropping any of them. That's what it feels like to run a school, says D'Amato, principal of Reagan High School, the south side school she has led from birth in 2003 to the top bracket of Milwaukee high schools now.
It's hard to find people who can juggle like that.
And it's hard for Milwaukee Public Schools to find top-notch people to lead approximately 200 schools.
As a new school year approaches, MPS is struggling with creating a strong, stable corps of principals. How so?
• More than 20% of elementary and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools have someone different at the helm now than a year ago, and turnover in recent years has, in general, been high. MPS officials say there are 58 principals with three years of experience or less, almost one-third of the total.
• Change goes beyond retirements and new hires. Superintendent William Andrekopoulos has moved principals from school to school frequently. He says he is trying to get better results from both people and schools. But some principals find the moves baffling and alienating.
• The system that was used for coaching principals in recent years has been dropped, and a new one, focused on mentoring newer principals, is being launched in cooperation with Alverno College.
• New Leaders for New Schools, a high-profile national program for preparing people to lead struggling schools, has encountered strong resistance within MPS. The program is key to plans for strong principals in MPS in the future, but some principals - and assistant principals who think the New Leaders program jeopardizes their chances of promotion - have little good to say about it.
• In general, principals such as D'Amato say the job has become harder, more complex and more demanding in recent years, and attracting good people to take the jobs has become harder. Among the reasons: More demands from administrators and politicians; increased burdens due to the federal No Child Left Behind law and the state's plan to make MPS change some of its practices; as well as the general impact of tighter budgets and higher poverty in the city.
• Some principals say morale is low in their ranks and fear is high of reprisals from the superintendent if principals stick their necks out in any way.
How to build up the quality of the corps of principals will be one of the biggest challenges facing the next superintendent of MPS. John Weigelt, executive director of the Administrators and Supervisors Council, an organization of MPS managers, said principals overall hope the next chief will be "someone who can inspire people to do their best work."
It is almost universally accepted among educators that a high-quality principal is key to a high-quality school.
Yet filling those jobs has gotten harder and more complex. MPS has gone through a series of changes, going back to Andrekopoulos' predecessor, Spence Korté, in how it selects principals, and it continues to make changes.
One key change in recent years is a shift away from looking at being an assistant principal as the preferred route to becoming a principal.
To Andrekopoulos and the founders of New Leaders for New Schools, this is a positive step. The field of candidates has broadened to include not only people in other roles but people outside MPS, especially if they go through the intensive program New Leaders is offering, including a summer of training and a year of internships in MPS schools.
"We have changed the notion that there's a rite of passage in the district . . . (that) just because you have seat time, you have a right to a position," Andrekopoulos said.
But that has made many principals and assistant principals unhappy.
How are principals picked? Sallie Brown, veteran principal of the Wisconsin Conservatory of Lifelong Learning and president of the administrators organization, said, "You would like to think there's rhyme or reason for it. If there is (an understandable process), I'm not privy to it."
Power to hire, fire
Everyone agrees that the power to pick, to assign and to shift around principals lies with the superintendent, and Andrekopoulos has used that power actively.
"That's my job, to put people in places where we think they can perform," he said when asked about shifts in principals that have made other MPS administrators unhappy. He said MPS is holding principals more accountable for success than in the past, and more work must be done to improve that system.
If anything, Andrekopoulos would like the MPS superintendent to have more power to hire and fire principals.
Now, they generally have tenure to stay as principals or, if they are relatively new in the job, to return to their prior jobs, often as assistant principals. Andrekopoulos said the job security is "an increasing concern I have."
He said that with a spate of retirements by veterans in the last few years, MPS has a roster of principals generally younger than in the past. "We have a lot of young, enthusiastic people who are giving it their all," he said. The pipeline for future appointments is getting better with the increasing presence of New Leaders and other efforts, he said.
But there are clearly strong critics within the system.
Weigelt said that morale among principals is "at the lowest point I've seen it in 12 years in this position" as director of the principals and administrators organization. "People are disheartened," he said. There are many reasons, from attacks on public education from outside the system to diminishing resources for schools to increasing demands on principals. One reason, he said, is that principals feel "hamstrung by central office policies."
Andrekopoulos has recentralized power in MPS in the past several years, putting principals and schools under more specific control and narrowing the choices schools can make in what they are doing, especially if the schools have had low test scores.
Those steps were recommended by outside consultants and are now part of the state Department of Public Instruction's orders for MPS.
But one result, Weigelt said, is that "the days of the maverick are gone - one cannot be a maverick in MPS and last very long."
A decade ago, it was a handful of maverick principals - including Korté and Andrekopoulos - who drove the dialogue about change in MPS. Now it is Andrekopoulos and the central office.
Changes causing division
The New Leaders program is intended to bring a wave of highly motivated people into principal jobs in MPS and nine other urban districts where the organization has operations. The goal is to put them in the most challenging schools, where they can shake things up and produce higher achievement.
But the program has encountered resistance, much from people in the MPS bureaucracy. The criticisms include that it is expensive and that it bypasses good training programs that include spending years building up to being a principal.
One sign of trouble in Milwaukee: Two people from the first wave of New Leaders training were assigned last year to lead challenging schools, Maple Tree on the northwest side and Urban Waldorf (now Twenty-Seventh Street). Both were transferred out at the end of the year by Andrekopoulos, who said both will be good principals but need more seasoning.
Almost no one is willing to talk about what happened, but the stories behind the moves were much more complicated. It is clear particularly that Jane Behr, who led Maple Tree, pushed the staff to focus more on achievement and to change some established practices, and that the staff became divided. Some supported her strongly and said in e-mails to MPS officials that they had the most successful year of their careers, while others opposed what she did. Test scores rose in her first year on the job.
Andrekopoulos offered Behr a position as an assistant principal at an elementary school, but she has requested a leave to work on her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jon Schnur, the Milwaukee-area native who is the co-founder and CEO of New Leaders, said he is confident the organization is starting to have substantial positive impact in the cities where it operates.
"We are on the brink of cracking the code of how to drive dramatic gains in low-performing schools across the country," he said.
Andrekopoulos said it is important to learn to use data better in guiding schools, accountability systems must be improved, and MPS must continue to press to get the best people it can to lead schools.
But, speaking from her vantage as a lead among Milwaukee's principals, D'Amato said, "It's getting harder and harder to get qualified, competent people to fill these positions because of the increased demands of the job."
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