Education Week - Calendar of Events & Professional Development Directory - Spring 2013 - C6

FOCUS ON: LEADERSHIP

PERSPECTIVE

Teacher Satisfaction:
A Matter of Principal

Rita Raichoudhuri, a
resident principal in
Chicago, reviews
paperwork with her
mentor principal,
Ernesto Matias.

I almost quit teaching five years ago, but I’m so glad I didn’t.
I won’t indulge you with all the gory details here, but suffice it to
say that my principal was a bit like Steve Carell’s character on the
NBC show “The Office.”
One day, I finally just broke down during a grade-level cluster meeting. I had given up breast-feeding my infant because there was no
consistent time available in the school day for me to pump. My administrators had recently cut a teaching position, leaving me with
33 3rd grade students in my class while my 2nd grade colleagues
had only 12 to 14. The final straw came when my 30-year-old male
principal lectured the all-female primary teachers in the meeting,
expressly forbidding us to speak.
I just couldn’t take it anymore. “I hate my job!” I shouted amid
tears.
He later told me privately, “It’s like you wanted me to fire you.”
Strange things happen in schools in terms of communication.
Teachers and administrators are often speaking different languages.
Teachers who are crying out for support and a voice often get a version of this from administrators: “If you’re not happy, you can leave.”
I know that retaining good teachers is vital to any long-term education improvement strategy, but I have a hard time believing it’s a
true priority for most schools and districts. The main people sounding the alarm on this issue besides teachers seem to be education
researchers, who are essentially powerless to implement changes.
From my experience, and based on what I hear from other teachers,
the prevailing sentiment among school leaders seems to be that
good teachers aren’t really that hard to find—schools can pick from
a long unemployment line.
But when throngs of teachers are leaving a school year after year,
the principal should come under high scrutiny. Hardworking teachers are not tools that should be discarded and replaced once they’ve
gotten old or a little banged up. We are professionals who need to
be supported, developed, and valued. We deserve opportunities to
grow in our careers. And administrators need to understand that
every good teacher who leaves significantly weakens the school’s
instructional program and sense of community.
By the same token, there is nothing wrong with good teachers
leaving the classroom to pursue other ambitions and opportunities.

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Putting Principal Training in Context
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 5

iStockphoto.com/Michael Mathis
Vanessa Solis

studies at the university and the
coordinator of its urban education
leadership program. “The right
place to develop capacity was in
the most challenging schools.”

When the joy of teaching fades or when a teacher is distracted by
a desire to make a broader impact, it may be time for him or her
to walk away without regrets. Staying may actually have adverse
effects. Besides, many teachers today are not the kind of people
whose professional goals include staying at the same school or in
the exact same position for 30 years (though there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, either).
Still, poor school leadership is one sure-fire way to end teaching
careers prematurely and destabilize schools. Having a strong yet
collaborative principal, however, can motivate teachers to stay in
the classroom longer than they ever thought they would.
I should know: I have an amazing principal now, and I’m in my
fifth year of not wanting to quit every day. n
MARILYN RHAMES is a middle-grades teacher at a charter school in Chicago
and runs a nonprofit called Teachers Who Pray. She is the author of the
Education Week Teacher blog Charting My Own Course. This piece originally
appeared in Teacher’s online forum Teaching Ahead: A Roundtable.
6

Greg Ruffing for Education Week

By Marilyn Rhames

Sharing Knowledge
Rituparna “Rita” Raichoudhuri,
a resident principal at Wells High
School in Chicago and a member of
the program’s 10th cohort, says her
residency has been helpful.
“The biggest learning here has
been really learning the day-today operations of the school, different things that happen in a
day with students and parents,”
she says. “I work hand in hand
with the principal. I’m doing everything he’s doing; I’m in every
meeting he’s in.”
Her mentor principal had been
in an earlier cohort in the same
program.
The University of Illinois program is one of four that are part of
the Chicago public schools’ Chicago
Leadership Collaborative, through
which the district is trying to bring
in more principals with internship or residency experiences and
whose education has been tied to
a set of “principal competencies”
outlined by the district.
At Winthrop University in Rock
Hill, S.C., the college of education
began focusing on coordinating its

Education WEEk 2 0 1 3 CA LENDA R O F EV EN T S & P ROFESSIONAL DEVELOP MENT DIRECT ORY

program with the nearby Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., school
system, and now does the same
for a number of smaller districts
in South Carolina, says Mark W.
Mitchell, the program director for
education leadership at the university.
“The things you teach are more
relevant when you can sit down
and talk with your students about
what’s actually happening in their

“

The right
place to develop
capacity was in the
most challenging
schools.”

STEVEN TOZER
Coordinator
Urban Education Leadership Program
University of Illinois at Chicago

district,” says Mitchell, who was a
principal before he came to Winthrop. “We have to become much
more cognizant of how important
it is for us to stay current with
what’s happening in the public
schools.”
The collaboration with the
141,000-student Charlotte-Meck-

lenburg system, which now receives funding from the Wallace
Foundation, began in 2004, when
Mitchell and another former school
administrator arrived at the university and set a goal of building
a relationship between the district
and the university.
Tying universities’ programs
more tightly to districts also has
the benefit of allowing districts and
programs to track their effectiveness, says King of the Education
Development Center.
The Chicago program has produced 83 principals in the city’s
public schools so far. Tozer says
that schools headed by graduates
of the program are more than
twice as likely to close achievement
gaps between students of different
racial and ethnic backgrounds.
“We’ve known for 35 years that a
really good principal could transform student-learning outcomes
in a very bad school—but we have
acted as if such principals were
born and not made,” says Paul
Zavitkovsky, a former principal
who now coaches aspiring leaders
through the Chicago program.
“We have to create the organizational structures,” he says, “to
take advantage of principals who
have succeeded to help pass on to
the next generation what they’ve
learned.”
This article originally appeared, in a
different form, in Education Week.

http://www.iStockphoto.com/Michael

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