Nice guy. Can’t run a school
OCTOBER 16, 2013 PM31 3:12 PM
In some schools a staff hates the principal – thinks he’s horrible, doesn’t trust him. Sometimes a staff adores a principal – thinks she does a great job, takes her at her word.
But what would you think if a staff likes the guy in charge, but doesn’t think he can run a school?
At one charter school in Manhattan, three out of four teachers trust the principal. But wait. Only one out of seven think she is an effective manager. At the Leadership Institute in District 9, in the Bronx, over 80% trust their principal, but only a third think she makes the school run smoothly. And at Invictus Prep, a charter school in Brooklyn, 95% of the teachers trust the principal at his word. But only half think he’s competent.
The 2013 Learning Environment surveys reveal this situation to be more common than one might expect. At 96 schools, at least one in five staffers thinks the principal trustworthy, but not competent. And in over 200 more schools at least 10% of the staff makes the same assessment.
These schools are not distributed evenly across the City. Charter schools are over-represented (8% of city schools, but 17% of the top of the list). Fifteen districts have only 0 – 2 schools on the top of the list.
Think about the teachers filling in the survey. They bubbled a negative answer, so they weren’t so scared of retaliation that they were sugarcoating their responses. And they did check off “I trust him at his word,” so they weren’t, in anger, bubbling all bottom scores for their principals. This is