From a McClatchy newspaper:
DALLAS The first major initiative of the new George W. Bush Institute will be to create a training program that will provide more qualified principals to the nation's public schools, officials announced Wednesday.
The institute, which will be based at Southern Methodist University, is launching the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership with a pilot program that includes school districts in Fort Worth, Dallas, Plano, Denver, St. Louis and Indianapolis.
The goal of the program is to train half of the nation's public school principals in the next decade.
I have some more below the fold, and a few comments.
Read more:
The plan
will develop regional consortiums of universities, local school districts and business leaders to develop "game-changing" training models that will include a national performance-based certification program.
Organizations, beyond the school systems, that are allied with this effort include Teach for America, New Leaders for New Schools, the Rainwater Charitable Foundation and Uplift Education, the latter being a charter school operator with one school in Arlington Texas.
The person directing the policy studies at the Institute, James Guthrie, is the former head of the Peabody Center for Education Policy, which is house at the Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt, one of the nation's preeminent places to train teachers. He insists that this will not be a cookie cutter approach:
The models used in the alliance will vary across the nation but must include certain elements, such as mentoring. Guthrie said school districts also will be encouraged to give more authority to principals so they can truly be leaders. The effectiveness of the programs will be evaluated based on student achievement.
The goal is to have certified 50,000 principals through this program in the next decade.
Several comments as I write about this on a rainy day in the DC suburbs.
Again we see overlap of certain organizations - TFA, NLNS - which probably means we will see some funding from some of the same sources, including the Foundations of Bill Gates and Eli Broad.
If one reads between the lines the idea of giving more authority to principals so they can truly be leaders sounds remarkably like a model that would totally do away with tenure. Given how the issue of tenure was hammered at the Teacher Town Hall meeting on Sunday, I do not think I am being paranoid in offering that analysis.
There is also the issue of the timing of this announcement. Note how many things are coming at the same time
... Waiting for Superman
... Education Nation
... this initiative from the Bush Institute
and one cannot help but wonder if there is not a coordinated effort going on intended to take over all of the discussions about education and drive them in a particular direction while excluding any voice that might offer contrary opinions or point out a different way of approaching education that might be more effective.
This initiative, even as it talks about the mentoring role of principals, seems to assume a top-down approach. Do the candidates have to have any prior experience in education? Apparently not. That pattern can also be found in the Superintendent Training program established by Eli Broad. The results of that endeavor have been a mixed bag.
The skill set of school administrators is to be sure different than those of most school teachers. Please note, I said MOST not all. Somehow if the purpose of a principal is to be an effective educational leader who can appropriately mentor teachers at a variety of levels, I would hope one might have more experience within school buildings.
And I am sorry, I am bothered by any approach that has as its goal dominance of American education - half the nation's new principals within a decade.
I felt it important to call attention to this effort, even as I lack sufficient information to know all the details of the endeavor. I am more than a little perturbed at how quickly something like this gets going without it being visible to the larger American public, the education of whose children will potentially be greatly affected by this if the effort is even moderately successful.
So I offer it for your consideration.
Peace.