# Firing Principals of underperforming schools is going to improve results. Is this magical thinking? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [October 11, 2014, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firing-principals-of-underperforming-schools-is-going-to-improve-results-is-this-magical-thinking/701075 "2014-10-11T23:52:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [October 13, 2014, 6:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firing-principals-of-underperforming-schools-is-going-to-improve-results-is-this-magical-thinking/701075/81 "2014-10-13T18:59:41Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > You’ve got to have some sort of consistent rubric that applies to literally HUNDREDS of radically different courses–not just elementary and High school, but special ed, music, art, PE, weird special topics classes that places have developed, etc. etc. It has to port across all disciplines, because you can’t really have a system where it’s easy for art teachers to end up with high wages but math teachers inevitably get fired after three years. I’m in a district where they’re trying to set this up, and even if you manage to get a coherent set of expectations going, it’s pretty problematic, for what I think of as the Soviet Front Effect (there’s probably a better name for it). As I understand it, and I might very well be mistaken, the Soviet army broke the back of the Nazis in World War II not because of superior tactics but in spite of poor tactics. And these poor tactics were a result of General terror, which is to say, the generals were terrified. Military strategy and tactics were laid out in Moscow by the Politburo and/or Stalin (I’m a little fuzzy on this part), out of a desire to streamline, to be sure that everyone was coordinated and doing the same thing, and that military approaches were in line with orthodoxy. Generals who deviated from Moscow’s orders were looking at Siberia or worse. So when generals confronted conditions on the ground that didn’t match Moscow’s orders–either because they saw opportunities Moscow didn’t anticipate, or dangers Moscow didn’t anticipate–they often proceeded with Moscow’s orders anyway, getting troops needlessly killed. When Central Office plans curriculum, something similar approaches, albeit with less bloodshed. They can come up with programs that, from central office, look wonderful, generally because textbook companies can hire very effective salespeople to convince central office about how great the curriculum is. And they can enforce the curriculum on teachers, telling us we must follow specific pacing guides, read specific scripts, use specific worksheets, etc. But a teacher in a classroom might notice an opportunity–a “teachable moment”–not listed in the curriculum. The teacher might have a special skill, whether it’s playing an instrument or quilting or a knack for chemistry or knowledge of game design, that could be used to make lessons come alove, given the opportunity. Or maybe a teacher notices that a particular curriculum doesn’t work very well at explaining how fractions work (despite what the textbook salespeople said), or that it spends too long on digraphs, or that it fails to provide opportunities for differentiation. The more the district makes its curricular expectations clear, the less flexibility teachers have to meet the specific opportunities and challenges that occur every day in the classroom. It’s doubly demoralizing for teachers, first and less importantly because it minimizes their sense of professionals who eercise judgment, and second and more importantly because it forces them to teach is suboptimal ways and to watch students suffer accordingly. Teachers don’t design widgets, and any educational system that treats them as assemblyline workers is going to fail. The challenge is to design an accountability system that provides very wide latitude in teaching methods while holding teachers accountable for results, and ALSO recognizing that student achievement and growth are both highly dependent on external factors outside the teachers’ control. ---
**Author:** ![Urbanredneck](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ea5d25/32.png) [@Urbanredneck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Urbanredneck)\ **Post date:** [October 15, 2014, 4:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firing-principals-of-underperforming-schools-is-going-to-improve-results-is-this-magical-thinking/701075/82 "2014-10-15T04:52:34Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > The problem with both merit pay and firing principals/teachers for low performance (which are exactly the same thing, and if you get one, you get the other) is that it is extraordinarily difficult to come up with any sort of cohesive evaluation instrument. I am in the middle of watching such a system come on line, and the practical problems are well nigh insurmountable. On a very practical level, if you are going to base a teacher or principal’s pay (or their continued employment) on their performance in any meaningful way, you’ve got to go out and watch them not just once a semester for 45 minutes, but close to a dozen times. You need to pre-conference and post conference with them so that you have some context for what you see, so you can understand if they are being effective. You have to have a clear vision of what “effective” looks likes, and you have to perfectly, accurately convey this to people in advance because jobs and pay are on the line–you won’t be able to keep good people if they have no faith that they won’t be fired because an arbitrary, unexplained system fired them/keeps them at low pay. Unless you are literally going to fire an entire new set of professional evaluators, the man-hours this requires for administrators is simply impossible. It’s not like they aren’t already busy. > > You’ve got to have some sort of consistent rubric that applies to literally HUNDREDS of radically different courses–not just elementary and High school, but special ed, music, art, PE, weird special topics classes that places have developed, etc. etc. It has to port across all disciplines, because you can’t really have a system where it’s easy for art teachers to end up with high wages but math teachers inevitably get fired after three years. > > You can use test scores, but you want to measure growth, not absolute scores (or else it’s just a "fire everyone at poor school each year) but measuring growth is a nightmare: You have to figure out what tests–state standardized tests only cover a handful of subjects in a handful of grades. You can have district-written tests, but for everything? Can you write hundreds of standardized, multiple choice tests that you think accurately measure student achievement? Remember, lots of courses maybe have 100 kids district wide taking them, maybe all under one teacher–each is just one little weirdness, but it adds up to serious percentage of students and teachers. And how do you measure growth in some of these? You’ve have a tiny sample size, and often no predecessor course. > > All these problems apply to comprehensive evaluations of both teachers and principals–because principal evaluations will just be a compilation of all the same data. I like what you said here. One thing you left out is school politics. Teachers suck up to principals in order to keep their jobs or a cherished position. Often principals will ignore bad teachers - I’ve seen it - if said teacher also supports them even to the point of spying on other teachers. Then you throw in the kids whom may have parents on the school board or be head of the PTA and such. On teacher evaluation. One thing though is if you ask the teachers in a building who is the best or worse, they can tell you. On test scores: I know of one case in Kansas City where the teachers worked together to get rid of a bad principal. How? They simply told the kids to do bad on the standardized tests. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [October 18, 2014, 4:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firing-principals-of-underperforming-schools-is-going-to-improve-results-is-this-magical-thinking/701075/83 "2014-10-18T04:45:29Z")
> [@Frylock](#): > > Have any principals been fired in this way, or is this a forecast? Here [Metompkin Elementary School principal reassigned](http://www.delmarvanow.com/media/cinematic/video/16097449/) [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/firing-principals-of-underperforming-schools-is-going-to-improve-results-is-this-magical-thinking/701075.md?page=4)