E-Accountability OPINION

by Betsy Combier

The new C-30 process was made a regulation soon after Bloomberg/Klein took over the school system. The new regulations took the parent involvement piece out, making members of the School Leadership Team the only potential C-30 participants. Formerly, parents who wanted to volunteer to look at resumes and interview candidayes for a school principal position, could. But these parents sometimes spoke out about the "undemocratic" process, so the NYC Department of Education took control over the election of School Leadership Team Members and then made it impossible for anyone not "elected" - read "appointed" - to the SLT could be involved. Of course none of this is written down, its' just the way the system works.

The Principal Prize
Friday, July 9, 2004
by Ron Isaac. EducationNews.org

There is no more eye-popping, jaw-dropping, and brain-numbing ordeal left to common folks than having a hand in the sticky business of picking a school principal. The process is always respected, especially when the outcome is never in doubt. Here is one typical case. It is not the product of the writer's imagination.

A veteran principal quits and a temporary replacement is installed. This replacement, an enfant-terrible of the new CEO-type management philosophy, is a darling of the superintendent with whom he has crossed paths before. This superintendent will have the final word over who the successful applicant will be and he will not need to articulate his reasons. Almost always, the "interim acting" principal can keep the job for the asking, but first a farce of formalities must be played out.

The school's Leadership Team interviews the candidates. The Team is given the names of not more than five candidates who have been pre-screened in this case by the same superintendent who already bestowed the favor of a provisional principalship on one of the current candidates. If it suits him, he may take into account the Team's unanimous verdict, particularly if it coincides with his own.

The majority of the Leadership Team must be parents of students. These parents need not be literate or otherwise qualified in any way. The remaining members are from the professional staff, including a supervisor who will be asked to rate the candidacy of the same boss under whom he is presently serving.

Within three hours, every resume' ( of which there are three copies each ) must be studied by as many as fourteen Team members. All applicants must be asked the identical five questions, agreed on unanimously by all members, in the form of a recitation from a prepared Department of Education script. After each interview, the applicant is rated on a merit scale from one to four, and the confidential sheets passed forward sometimes in plain view. The successful candidate will usually be the incumbent principal because each constituency has something to gain if evidence of their support somehow leaks out. Remember that every vote is a political act.

Among the Chancellor's Regulations are some strict prohibitions. You cannot ask the applicant whether he has been arrested or ever had a drug or alcohol problem. You are forbidden from knowing whether a female candidate prefers to be called Ms., Mrs., or Miss. Chancellor's Regulation C-30 Attachment No. 4 actually states, "Do not ask the candidate's sex." The words "do not" appear in thick bold type.

If an applicant has been dishonorably discharged from the military, you are mandated to assure him that such a discharge is not a bar to employment. You are banned from inquiring what the candidate's "native language is or how s/he acquired the ability to read, write, or speak a language..." It is off limits to ask "the candidate for a contact in case of an emergency."

The principal is the educational leader of any school. For power, prestige, and pay, it remains a coveted post. Yet only one or two candidates, including the incumbent, may actually show up to be interviewed. That is not due to panic attack. It is because of the perception that the legitimate democratic process of selection is neither legitimate nor democratic. In at least one case, a junior high principalship was advertised as an elementary school vacancy. People need to know what they're applying for so they can at least improvise their credentials.

There is more than one route by which principals are made. According to Chancellor's Regulation C-30, the former "two (2) year supervisory experience requirement for principal positions has been eliminated." For generations, new principals had at least ten years of teaching and supervisory experience before they presumed to apply for a principalship. Often they were published scholars. Today, many are in their third decade of life with no teaching or supervisory record. No seasoned classroom professional would take orders from such a greenhorn, no matter their authority.

According to the regulation governing the appointment of supervisors, "With guidelines provided by the Department of Human Resources, responsibility centers will determine if applicant pools are not representative of qualifying eligible lists...If the pools are not, then the filing period for the position will be extended...The DHS will determine when participation of a neutral observer is required." This writer has not found anyone who can clarify what this all means.

The selection benchmark for principals include "educational, managerial and administrative, and performance record criteria." That sounds thorough, but the descriptions are so vague and subjective that they can be bent to fit any aspirant. How, for example, is one to be "required to enunciate a clear mission" or "create linkages to benefit students at the school site"?

Most ironic is the heroic measure taken to preserve the hygienic appearance of (allegedly) done deals. The Chancellor's Regulation states that "information concerning applicants that was learned outside of the selection process shall not be revealed during the selection process." Further,, "no one may serve on a (selection) Committee if he is a close relative...of an applicant." How close is that?

Regardless of student demographics and teacher training, no school can run well without a solid and gifted principal. They should be chosen with care, courage, and for the right reason.
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...but they are not. School Leadership Team members in New York City speak often to parentadvocates about the strict guidelines that must be followed when a candidate is interviewed for the position of Principal. There is no fairness, or no consideration of "independent" opinions. The Department of Education picks the person they want before the interview period, and the interviewers must "independently" pick the same candidate. No deviations are allowed. S. Richard Gard told his story from Atlanta, where he is the Editor of the Fulton County Daily Report:

My Field Trip From Sanity With Atlanta Public SchoolsS. Richard Gard Jr.,Editor and Publisher, Fulton County Daily Report, June 16, 2003
rgard@amlaw.com

LINK

Superintendent Beverly L. Hall wants to give Deloitte & Touche three months and almost a half-million dollars to tell her what's wrong with Atlanta Public Schools. I can tell her based on five hours in sham interviews for a new school principal. And my report won't cost her a dime.

As an eight-year parent at one of the system's best-performing elementary schools, and an eight-year volunteer at one of its poorest, I already knew Atlanta Public Schools was no threat to win a Baldridge Award for management excellence. But until my recent experience on a school-principal interview panel, I regarded the institutional befuddlement with amused resignation.

Such as when a recent APS district-residency crackdown required me to disgorge more real estate documentation to my neighborhood principal than I had to produce for my mortgage lender.

Or when our school last month refused to release children to their parents at the end of the school day because APS had issued a weather bulletin more severe than any storm. Our principal took to the public address to declare the school in "lockdown." What was this, Attica?

But the bad joke that is APS management turns cruel when loosed on more serious issues and on schools more in need of help than the one in my neighborhood. My grievance concerns John Hope Elementary, the school serving the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic District downtown and with which the Daily Report has had a close relationship for the past eight years. Pick any statistic you want-test scores, meal assistance, attendance, enrollment, English speakers-John Hope usually competes for a low rung in any ranking.

Many of John Hope's ills result from circumstances beyond school system control-poverty, the breakdown of the family and even the legacy of addiction. But the school's most recent disadvantage derived from something utterly controllable and indeed overly controlling-the way APS management went about finding a replacement for John Hope's retiring principal.

My five hours in administrative lockdown in an interview room on the eastside provided an education. It offered a rare glimpse inside the mind of one of local government's most dysfunctional bureaucracies.

This story does, however, have a happy ending. The woman I considered the best candidate for the job did win out. The Atlanta Board of Education on June 9 approved Superintendent Hall's recommendation of Lisa Harvin as John Hope's next principal. That Harvin prevailed is more a testament to her abilities than to the methods used to select her.

Unfortunately, the trouble doesn't end with John Hope. As I was to be reminded anytime I questioned school system policy, the procedures used for that talent search are those used throughout the school system. The village idiocy, I was assured, is systemic.

A Bad Foretaste

The John Hope interviews took place June 2. I had a seat at the table because I serve on John Hope's Local School Council, a remnant of former Gov. Roy E. Barnes' education reforms, this one aimed at getting parents and the business community more involved in their local schools.

The week before the interviews gave me a pungent foretaste. Clue No. 1 came in the form of two telephone calls, one from the outgoing John Hope principal and one from an APS clerk, to verify my home address. Never mind that, as noted above, APS already has enough metes and bounds for our residence to conduct a full title exam. Downtown wanted to send me an official welcome and confirmation letter with directions to the interview facility. As of press time, I'm still waiting for the letter.

Clue No. 2 came when I spoke with APS Executive Director of Human Resources Millicent D. Few. I wanted to give her my fax number so she could send me the candidates' resumes.

That's against policy, she said, citing privacy.

Privacy? I asked. You mean to tell me it violates the rights of job applicants to let the people interviewing them see their resumes?

She responded with a short, set speech about how long and well these procedures have served APS. If less is more, it became clear from the conversation, Few is too much.

Clue No. 3 came via a telephone call from Gloria P. Patterson, executive director of School Reform Team 3, the eastern region of the school system encompassing John Hope. She asked if I had any interview questions to submit.

Well, it's a little hard to know what to ask without seeing the resumes, I said. I'll just ask my questions when I get there.

That's against policy, she said. The questions must be approved in advance and must be the same for all the candidates.

You ask all of them the same rote questions and call that an interview? I said.

They're not rote, she bristled.

I took that as a yes.

A Silenced Partner

When interview day arrived it was, as all the portents promised, a descent down the rabbit hole and a flight over the cuckoo's nest. Our nine-member interview team convened at 8 a.m. We had 30 minutes to get our instructions and, at last, review the candidate resumes.

Well, not all of them. We had eight contestants that day. HR director Few rationed us file folders for just the first four. By pressing the point, I got my hands on the other four later that morning, but it was a hollow victory. As warned, I had no time to read any resume until a few minutes before a person's interview.

I have no idea how Few & Co. narrowed the field to these particular eight. Three times I asked. Three times I got a policy statement about APS's goal of seeking out leaders qualified to serve not just John Hope but wherever their next APS posting takes them.

On closer questioning, Few allowed she had interviewed some but not all of the eight. It eventually became clear that some of the candidates were stand-ins-extras used to fill out a somewhat narrow field.

The interview team included SRT3 chief Patterson, to whom the new John Hope principal will report; a principal from another Atlanta elementary school; a John Hope teacher; the past and present John Hope PTA presidents; a Clark Atlanta University professor who taught at the school 40 years ago; an intown neighborhoods representative; and a volunteer from one of John Hope's staunchest supporters, the local Unitarian church.

It was a good sampling of John Hope's different constituencies-"stakeholders" they kept calling us, to the point that if somebody called me that again I was going to drive my stake through her heart. For all the talk about our vested interests in the school's success, our status was decidedly nonequity. We were regarded more as silent partners, better to be seen and not heard.

Stay Within the Lines

Interview, of course, is a misnomer for the event that took place. Interview connotes question and answer. It suggests a conversation and a certain level of engagement. This exercise made no such demands on either propounder or respondent.

Here's how it worked, which is to say, why it doesn't. Try using these methods to pick a top manager for your business, your law firm or, fellow taxpayer, your school.

A staff committee came up with the questions days or weeks in advance. Most read like a speech, fusing together two or three unrelated ideas and then tacking a question mark on the end. Usually the question at the conclusion had nothing to do with the premises at the beginning.

No. 4, for example, started out by making a global statement about the importance of hiring qualified staff, but ended by asking what the candidate would do to develop school pride.

To give the interviewers the illusion of participation, Patterson assigned each of us the reading of one question. You must read your question to every candidate verbatim, no variations, no improvisations, she instructed us. And no follow up questions-this last admonition came in response to one of my queries.

Reading, 'Riting & Regurgitation

Patterson included in our materials a memo listing 44 key words and phrases of APSspeak. Listen for these, the memo says, to help gauge a candidate's "depth of knowledge and understanding of some of the key concepts necessary to provide leadership to schools."

The list included "Bloom's Taxonomy," which apparently had nothing to do with rising school millage rates, and "Higher Order Thinking Skills," which apparently had nothing to do with how I was spending my day.

The wiseguy from the newspaper raised his hand again: Ms. Patterson, I asked, if I don't understand a term, I assume I can ask for clarification.

Clarification is against the rules she said, "so that every candidate has the same opportunity to answer the exact same question."

The process thus favors the professional job interviewer, the person who can glibly gibber jargon-laced answers-the regurgiteur extraordinaire, she who can best digest the Pablum fed to her and upchuck it back in buzzword projectiles from Patterson's list.

Oh, but did I not tell you the method is scientific? Each of us on the panel received in our packets a stack of blank score sheets, one for each of the eight contestants. The form listed the nine questions and provided spaces to grade each answer from one to five, with five being the highest. The top three cumulative point-getters then go on to the lightning round with Superintendent Hall, where they presumably undergo a real interview.

First, however, they have to beat the clock. Each contender had exactly 30 minutes to answer the nine questions. This is done in the name of fairness. And it's entirely fair, unless you're foolish enough to provide a thoughtful answer. That can cost you. Give a particularly considered response to No. 6-a big fat slow-pitch softball having to do with setting high expectations and making students successful-and you could find yourself out of time to answer No. 9. No answer, no points, no job.

It Takes a Valium

In scoring, I gave up trying to assess the quality of answers to questions that held little relevance and even less of my interest. Instead, I gave out fours and fives to the candidates who seemed capable of independent thought. I doled out ones and twos to those who had no business operating a pencil sharpener, let alone running a school. (Ask me how I scored the candidate who told us it takes a village to raise a child.)

We did see some good candidates, including Harvin, the woman ultimately tapped for the position. A principal relocating from the Baltimore public schools, Harvin had come up through the ranks of the Los Angeles system. She came across as smart and professional, and she spoke of her accomplishments in terms both concrete and passionate. She was great, and I made a point of giving her straight fives. I only would have liked to interview her.

That lament became my silent refrain throughout the day. One contender came off as too serious. It wasn't her fault, just the artificiality of the interview format. Had it allowed more give-and-take, we might have coaxed her to loosen up and show us some spark, an essential element in lifting a school such as John Hope beyond everyone's diminished expectations.

The candidate in the green dress gave great jargon. She said nothing. And because neither did I, her babble went unbrooked. I peeked around the table and watched her rack up a dangerous number of points from my less cynical colleagues.

One of our last interviews was the most polished, maybe too polished. Her resume, not organized chronologically, needed more study than they allowed us. And her rural-suburban resume made her an odd fit for John Hope.

I could stand the strictures no longer. My turn came to read aloud question No. 9, some nonsense about ensuring "that an exciting, stimulating program is in place to address the needs of all students."

"Ms. X," I said (please notice how I protect her privacy by not divulging her real initial), "Looking at your resume, I'm having trouble seeing how your background meshes with the urban realities of John Hope Elementary School. I'm not allowed to ask you that question. Instead, I have to read to you this canned question. In answering it, please try to address my concerns."

Before she could answer, Patterson intervened: "You can only answer the canned question." I took some small satisfaction in hearing the executive director adopt my terms of art, as obstinate as I had been about using hers.

Maybe You Need Better Lawyers

Superintendent Hall: You say you want advice. Here's mine.

First, end the charade. Either you want parents and local business people to inform the selection of school principals in their communities or you don't. I hope you do. But, if you don't, please don't squander our time and your credibility by casting us in these badly scripted school plays.

Second, if your lawyers say you have to run an interview this way, find yourself some better lawyers. No self-respecting organization hires the way you do. Your HR department's self-parody bore all the markings of bad advice greatly indulged.

Third, aim higher. Your hiring procedures need to focus on finding the best and brightest. Yours are singularly concerned with avoiding claims of unfairness. There's a way to accomplish both goals.

It starts with an unbiased and unapologetic focus on quality. Equal treatment does not mean equal time and equal questions. Not all candidates have equal credentials. Some deserve more time, closer questioning and a higher level of engagement. Others, well, deserve greater respect of their time, ready validation of their parking and an earnest and early valediction.

These are just a few of my opinions. I have more where they came from. If I can help any further, please don't hesitate to contact me. I believe you have my home address. [end]