Memphis City Schools: The Next Generation of Principals

[Pages:21]A JOINT INITIATIVE OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL

PEL-027

REV: AUGUST 9, 2007

STACEY CHILDRESS

ROBERT PETERKIN

TONIKA CHEEK CLAYTON

Memphis City Schools: The Next Generation of Principals

On November 18, 2004, Memphis City Schools (MCS) Superintendent Carol R. Johnson waited in her office for a telephone call from the principal of Geeter Middle School (Geeter). That morning, Johnson had arrived to a flood of parental complaints and media calls regarding the principal's decision to suspend the entire eighth-grade class because students refused to apologize and clean up after a cafeteria food fight. The Geeter principal was leading a school for the first time, and while some parents supported the new principal's actions, many questioned her judgment and experience in maintaining an orderly learning environment. Johnson worried that the school's escalating disciplinary problems and the community's response would distract the principal from her role as an instructional leader. Before communicating with school board members, news reporters, and parents, Johnson wanted to speak directly with the principal to make sure she had all of the facts. The media frenzy had brought attention to the recent influx of first-time principals hired to turn around several of the district's underperforming schools.

In the four years leading up to the 2004-2005 (SY05), Geeter had been under heavy scrutiny by the district and the state for not meeting adequate yearly progress (AYP) targets. As with several other schools in a similar predicament, Johnson appointed a new principal to Geeter as part of the district's action plan to improve student achievement and to reverse the school's substandard record. Overall, MCS hired 31 new principals that year, 29 of whom had no prior experience as principals. Because 52% of MCS's 185 principals would be eligible to retire within three years, Johnson was preoccupied with developing new principals and expanding the pipeline of high-quality candidates.

Johnson reflected on her team's initial efforts to strengthen the pipeline of quality candidates, match newly hired principals to appropriate schools, and provide principals with the support and resources to be successful instructional leaders. The situation at Geeter raised questions concerning a new principal's capacity to carry out MCS's instructional agenda and the district's ability to effectively support the increasing number of inexperienced principals. She believed that highperforming principals were a key lever for improving student achievement across the district, and she wondered if her team had built the right foundation for identifying and preparing candidates.

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Research Associate Tonika Cheek Clayton prepared this case under the supervision of HBS Lecturer Stacey Childress and HGSE faculty member Robert Peterkin. PELP cases are developed solely as the basis for class discussion. Cases are not intended to serve as endorsements, sources of primary data, or illustrations of effective or ineffective management.

Copyright ? 2005, 2007 Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. To request permission to reproduce materials, call 617-4950766 or write to PELP, 34 Loeb House, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA 02163. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, used in a spreadsheet, or transmitted in any form or by any means--electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise--without the permission of Harvard Business School.

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Memphis City Schools: The Next Generation of Principals

Background

MCS Demographics and History

Serving over 119,000 students, MCS was the largest school district in the state of Tennessee (see Exhibits 1 and 2 for MCS facts and figures). Shaped by a history of desegregation laws, busing integration policies, annexation, and racial tensions, MCS evolved over 50 years from a majority white student population1 at the time of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling to one in SY05 that was 86% black, 9% white, 4% Hispanic, and 1% other, including Asians and other ethnicities. Seventy-one percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price meals, 14% participated in special education programs, and 4% had limited English proficiency. In SY04, MCS showed modest gains in reading test scores and significant improvement in every subgroup on math test scores. In high school algebra, the percentage of students scoring at proficient or advanced increased from 42% in SY03 to 60% in SY04. Nevertheless, MCS still fell short of meeting state goals across several student achievement indicators assessed yearly by the Tennessee Department of Education (see Exhibit 3 for MCS student achievement indicators).

In Tennessee, county governments typically ran school districts. However, MCS had special status as a city-operated district and was funded by the city, county, state, and federal government. The district was located in Shelby County, which independently operated a neighboring school district, Shelby County Schools (SCS), making Shelby County a rare dual-district county. Serving approximately 46,000 students, SCS catered to a predominantly white (68%), middle-class community with less than 13% of students eligible for Title 12 federal funds.3 In recent years, conflicts between the two districts over county funds had escalated in part due to SCS's population influx as a result of suburban growth and MCS's request for more financial resources to fund student achievement initiatives. In contrast to MCS, SCS surpassed the majority of the state's student achievement goals in SY04 and was two percentage points short of reaching the state's graduation goal of 90%.4

Attempts to consolidate the two districts over the years (most recently in early 2003) were opposed by SCS leadership and residents who felt that consolidating the districts would bring down the quality of education in SCS schools. Some MCS board members and community leaders also publicly expressed skepticism at the proposed benefits of handing over the reins of MCS to SCS leadership. Proponents of consolidation argued that it would streamline the tax and budget process in the city and county, provide more equitable resources to schools across the county, and maintain the quality of education at any given school. Although the most recent push to dissolve the MCS charter had failed, this issue perpetually loomed over both districts.

Superintendent Carol Johnson

Originally from Brownsville, Tennessee, a town 63 miles outside Memphis, Johnson took the helm of MCS in the fall of 2003 following a six-year stint as the superintendent of Minneapolis City

1 "City Schools Integration Timeline," The Commercial Appeal, May 16, 2004.

2 Federally funded programs in high-poverty schools that target children with low achievement (definition cited from the Tennessee Department of Education website, , accessed January 15, 2005).

3 "Shelby County Report Card 2004," Tennessee Department of Education website, , accessed January 15, 2005.

4 Ibid.

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Schools. Highly respected and trusted in Minneapolis, Johnson built a strong reputation for working collaboratively with parents, board members, principals, teachers, and the external community to achieve results. After spending 30 years of her career in Minneapolis, Johnson chose to bring her skills and experience to MCS, a school district almost three times the student enrollment size of Minneapolis's with tighter financial constraints and a higher rate of poverty and illiteracy.

In her first 15 months, Johnson took action in a number of key areas. Forced to cut over $25 million from the proposed MCS SY05 budget in her first term, she eliminated over 90 central office positions and restructured the district's administrative departments. She also successfully campaigned to repeal the school board's policy for corporal punishment after a highly publicized community debate. MCS also won bids to partner with national programs, New Leaders for New Schools and the New Teacher Project to raise the quality of its principals and teachers.

With 148 of 191 MCS schools on the state's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) watch list of failing schools at the start of SY04, Johnson's administration successfully worked to clear 77 schools from the list by the start of SY05. After assessing the 15 schools in the "corrective action" category under the NCLB guidelines,5 Johnson decided to "fresh-start"6 the five worst schools. She removed the principals in these five schools and replaced them with new leaders and instructional staffs. Freshstart principals were given the autonomy to completely replace existing staff, from custodians to teachers. Johnson placed first-time principals in three of the five fresh-start schools. For the remaining 10 schools under corrective action, Johnson prescribed a mix of actions from replacing principals and/or selected teachers to reconfiguring grade structure and program designs. In total, Johnson assigned 11 of the 29 new first-time principals to underperforming schools labeled as "high priority" under NCLB guidelines.7

Johnson believed that principals were critical change agents because of their front-line interaction with teachers and students; therefore, an important component of her strategy focused on preparing and managing principals to be more effective instructional leaders. She noted, "In the schools where we've had progress, despite poverty and language barriers, it seems to be that the principal's leadership has created an environment where the staff believes in the notion that all students can learn and can achieve at higher levels."

Although the district mandated that principals adopt common literacy and math curriculums, they were given some autonomy in the day-to-day management of when and how to deliver the content. As instructional leaders, they were expected to ensure that teachers effectively taught the curriculum set forth by MCS. Johnson described her view on instructional leadership:

For awhile across the nation, we saw principals hired for their management skills so that buses ran on time, kids were served, the halls were clean, and the school had no major incidents. And that was what constituted good leadership. But I think in the new order of work, leadership around instruction takes center stage. We need principals who know what high-quality instruction looks like and how to work with teams of teachers to achieve it.

5 If after four years a school has still not improved, it is placed on the "corrective action" list and put on probation. At this stage, the State Department of Education may take action such as removing school staff, increasing the length of the school day or year, or decreasing the authority of local management (explanation cited from the MCS website, , accessed January 28, 2005).

6 "Fresh-start" schools were assessed as having no prior proven record of effectiveness. These schools were completely restructured and assigned new leadership and instructional staff.

7 Schools categorized as "high priority" have not met NCLB federal benchmarks for at least two consecutive years.

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Memphis City Schools: The Next Generation of Principals

Principal Management and Support

In order to more effectively manage and support school leaders, Johnson hired Deputy Superintendent Bernadeia Johnson and appointed five academic directors to directly supervise principals (see Exhibit 4 for organizational chart). Bernadeia Johnson oversaw both the academic directors and the academic leadership team (ALT), which included, the academic directors, the associate superintendent of curriculum and instruction, and the district's NCLB representative. The ALT created the district's academic agenda each year and was responsible for carrying it out at the school level. Each week, the group met to report on the status of the current agenda, to refine the agenda for the upcoming year, and to discuss issues that had surfaced at the school level. By participating in the ALT, academic directors used the input they gleaned from daily interactions with principals to help steer the academic agenda and its implementation. At the same time, the ALT influenced the academic directors' management of principals by setting the district's instructional priorities, which informed decisions about resource allocation to and professional development for schools..

The Role of Academic Directors

Carol Johnson revised a long-standing organizational structure in which principals were geographically assigned to one of three zone directors whose primary function was operational support. Under the old system, one zone director supervised and evaluated principals across both elementary and secondary levels with less of a focus on the school's instructional agenda. The revised structure created an academic director for high schools, one for middle schools, and three for elementary schools. The number of schools managed by one academic director ranged from 25 to 38 schools. An academic director's main function was to drive the district's instructional agenda and to provide his or her principals with support and development opportunities (see Exhibit 5 for a list of academic director responsibilities).

High school academic director James Bacchus explained some differences between the new and old roles:

In the past, the zone directors were more or less operational managers involved in all the K12 schools in their geography. A former zone director confessed he didn't know anything about elementary schools because his experience was in high schools. Every time he needed to address a situation at an elementary school, he had to talk to another director who had elementary experience. By being focused only on high schools, I can focus on all of a school's issues, not just the operations piece. I can support the principal by helping them focus on academic challenges and by assisting them with resource allocation issues such using staff and dollars more strategically.

In addition to providing support for individual schools, academic directors oversaw resource allocation across schools in an attempt to achieve a more equitable balance of resources. Under the old system, a principal's ability to garner resources from the central office often depended more on his or her personal relationships within the district than on the relative level of need compared with that of other schools. Consequently, some schools had the latest technology and renovations, while others operated with significantly fewer amenities. Elementary school academic director Virginia McNeil observed: "We try to make sure there's an equitable distribution of funds, personnel, grants, materials, and equipment. So each time we have a chance to allocate funds or distribute personnel, we take into consideration those schools with the highest rate of poverty and those schools listed under `corrective action' or `high priority.'"

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Principal Support and Development

Bernadeia Johnson and the academic directors communicated with principals in a variety of ways. Before SY05 began, principals attended the Principal Leadership Academy (PLA), a three-day session hosted by the district designed to introduce principals to the new academic leadership team, review the MCS academic agenda, and provide them with some professional development tools for the upcoming year (see Exhibit 6 for PLA agenda).

Each month, all principals convened for a mandatory four-hour meeting to get the latest district updates from Carol Johnson and other MCS central office administrators. These meetings also allocated time for the academic directors and principals to break into their subgroups to discuss issues or progress made at individual schools. Additionally, each academic director put together a principal advisory committee that helped determine the kind of developmental support principals within their subgroup needed. To make sure that the majority of interests were served, the academic director usually selected principals of varying experience levels and from different backgrounds to serve on the committee.

Support from academic directors varied across principal subgroups depending on the academic director's management style and the nature of the challenges facing the principals. Academic directors also differentiated the support they provided for schools based on the school's performance and the principal's experience. Underperforming schools and schools with first-time principals were subject to more instructional "walk-throughs" and visits than other schools. Academic directors typically required new principals to meet more frequently and participate in more development sessions than their more experienced peers. Also, first-time principals were paired with a mentor, a veteran principal whom they could rely on for guidance about building-level issues or help in navigating the larger system. Elementary school academic director Myra Whitney discussed the work she did with her principals:

I've been working with my principals mainly on two things: school improvement plans and literacy. When I visit the schools, I have all of their data with me, and I take materials that can help them. They share with me and I share with them what I've thought of and what they might want to use. These visits are very focused. My next step is to help them see the impact that the learning environment can have on promoting our literacy initiative.

My first-time principals and principals in their second and third years are participating in a book study. Everybody's reading a book on creating professional learning communities. I meet with them once a month. I'm constantly on the phone with them and going out to their schools. The new principals are also participating in a book study on emotional intelligence because I'm trying to stress the importance of relationships for first-time principals, especially relationships with families and the staff, before they make quick judgments.

Middle school academic director Brenda Cassellius described the kinds of support she provided to her group of principals:

I love technology and I love data, so I contacted the IT Department and I said, "Look, I've got 11 schools on the [NCLB] list only because of attendance, and these 11 schools also have high suspension rates. For every meeting, I need to give my principals data on suspension and attendance and how their suspensions are affecting their attendance rate." And so at every principals meeting they got a packet with all that information and we talked about how to analyze what the data said and how to act on it.

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