‘If Only You Knew …’

Facts that could change the game for superintendents who are new to a school district.

 Situation No. 1: If only you knew how many schools our principal supervisors must support compared to our peer districts. How does that support play out for principals? You could then determine whether your principal supervisors were set up for success and if not, how to get them there.

Last year, Robert Avossa arrived in Palm Beach County, Fla., as the superintendent to find a bifurcated school support structure, with one group of traditional area superintendents and another providing injections of transformation support to a subset of schools. In surveys, principals highlighted the lack of cohesiveness in district supports, while district leaders believed much of their potential impact was lost in a system that inadvertently created barriers between the district office and schools.

Avossa moved quickly to address the challenge. His new approach combined traditional and transformational support teams, radically reduced the number of schools each supervisor had to support and assigned the most challenged schools to the most effective supervisors, with still lower spans of review for these leaders. Combining the teams also enabled Avossa’s team to move $5 million out of the district office and into schools, where it could be rapidly invested in targeted instructional support.

 Situation No. 2: If only you knew how much collaborative planning time teachers have each week. How do they spend that time? You could then help school leaders and their teams make teacher collaboration a centerpiece of instructional improvement.

In one district where we worked, collaborative planning time for teachers was nominally part of each school’s improvement plan, but in practice the joint planning was a “nice to have” option. In most schools, common planning time did not include all teachers in the same content area nor did the attention focus on the nuts and bolts of improving instruction.

Knowing this and gathering input from an array of constituents, the new superintendent and his team prioritized effective teacher collaboration in the district’s new strategic plan. The team was able to create new school leadership roles for the most effective teachers. These leaders facilitate meaningful collaboration using established protocols. By helping teachers improve their practice, these teacher leaders also expand their impact on students.

 Situation No. 3: If only you knew what percentage of resources principals actually have control over. You could then understand the true extent of their flexibilities and control over decision making.

In his early stakeholder discussions, Indianapolis Public Schools’ superintendent Lewis D. Ferebee heard how principals felt constrained by a compliance-oriented central office, which limited their ability to strategically organize scarce school resources. In his first year, Ferebee shifted more resources from the central office to schools, while developing a strategy to increase resource flexibility for a subset of schools in the near term.

Since then, the district’s spending on district-level leadership and management has declined by 20 percent and the district is launching its second cohort of schools with higher levels of flexibility this fall.