Parents, Teachers Protest Principals' Styles

 

 

Just from reading the headline, I immediately guessed (correctly) that these were New Leaders for New Schools principals.  NLNS (www.nlns.org) is a great organization that works with school districts to attract and train top-notch people to become principals, typically at the toughest schools.  This is an incredibly tough assignment: if you think it's hard starting a highly successful inner-city school from scratch, as KIPP and others do, just try turning around a chronically failing school, in which you inherit most of the same people responsible for the failure: teachers, their union, bureaucrats and, yes, parents!

 

Even in schools in which nearly every child is many years below grade level, where there's truly nowhere to go but up, there is typically enormous resistence to change (even, tragically, from some parents), which I have no doubt is one of the primary challenges faced by NLNS principals.

Principals at two well-regarded D.C. public schools have become the target of demonstrations and organized efforts to oust them because parents, and in one case teachers, too, have lodged complaints about their management styles.

Protesters are demanding a greater voice in the way Natasha Warsaw at J.G. Whittier Elementary and Melissa Kim at Alice Deal Junior High run their schools. Whittier teachers are looking for more input in school decisions, and a group of parents at Deal say Kim has an abrasive style and too harshly punishes black and Hispanic students for minor infractions.

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Parents, Teachers Protest Principals' Styles

By Theola Labbé
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 29, 2007; B04

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/28/AR2007052801371_pf.html

Principals at two well-regarded D.C. public schools have become the target of demonstrations and organized efforts to oust them because parents, and in one case teachers, too, have lodged complaints about their management styles.