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Principal turnover is hindering county schools, report says
School system says leadership changes were made in response to poor performance at some schools
Dennis Carter, Prince George's Gazette, (Jan. 17, 2008)
A Baltimore-based education advocacy group is calling for more incentives to retain experienced principals, pointing to high turnover in Prince George’s County as a possible reason for some schools’ poor performance.
In a report published in December, Advocates for Children and Youth, a nonprofit education watchdog group in Maryland, showed repeated principal replacements at 14 of the county’s 32 middle schools between 2003 and 2007.
Schools spokesman John White said the study’s information, although factually correct, was misleading.
The principal turnover did not cause the schools in the study to perform poorly, he said; instead, the changes were made because the schools showed persistent academic struggles.
‘‘What is required of a school that is not achieving is a number of steps,” White said. ‘‘Change in leadership can be a great change.”
White also said the sample of schools the group used – schools with the highest poverty rate and lowest performance on standardized tests were selected – did not provide a fair representation of the progress being made at county schools.
The organization highlighted G. James Gholson Middle School in Landover, where five principals have been appointed since the school opened before the 2002-2003 academic year. In the 2003-2004 school year, the school’s leadership changed twice.
Among the 14 schools included in the study, 22 principal changes have been made since 2003. Three of those 22 administrators – 14 percent – had previously served as principals at other schools, according to the organization. Fifty-seven percent of the schools studied have had two or more principal replacements since 2003.
‘‘Turnover in leadership impacts the morale and the climate of the school,” said Terrylynn Terrell, education director for Advocates for Children and Youth, established in 1987. ‘‘I think change is good when you bring in someone who ... is a visionary, but constant change is not a good thing, especially when you have low performance and low-income kids.”
County school officials pointed out that many Prince George’s middle schools have had long-serving principals.
Rudyard Wallace of Benjamin Stoddert Middle School in Temple Hills and Robin Wiltison of Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Beltsville have been leading their schools for eight years. Gail Golden has headed Hyattsville Middle School for 10 years, and Constance Gibb has been principal at Buck Lodge Middle School in Adelphi for 11 years.
‘‘Certainly, a veteran principal has a better chance than someone who has just come on board,” said Golden, who said it took five years for her policies to take root and students to post better test scores at Hyattsville Middle. ‘‘[Faculty members] don’t know exactly what to expect because every principal brings different backgrounds, different strengths and weaknesses.”
Since the implementation in 2002 of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which placed emphasis on meeting mandated test scores, new principals come under intense scrutiny if progress is not made immediately, Golden said.
‘‘We’re all asked to fit a certain mold and to reach certain criteria. ... The stress of knowing that the staff has to change – it’s a frightening situation to work under,” she said.
Twenty-six of Prince George’s County’s 207 schools have new principals this school year; most of them served as assistant principals before they were appointed.
Schools included in the study showed consistent academic struggles. At Gholson Middle, 37.4 percent of eighth-graders scored proficient in reading last school year and 16.5 percent were math proficient. At William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, 37.3 percent of eighth-graders were reading proficient, while 22.5 percent were math proficient.
Prince George’s eighth-graders overall averaged 53 percent proficiency in reading and 37.6 percent in math. Most of the other schools in the report were near or above the county’s average middle school math and reading scores in 2007.
The organization also studied Baltimore city and Baltimore County school systems.
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