Communities & Principals

There is a struggle going on in DISD right now with the Rosemont community trying to keep their principal from being fired.  The Rosemont parents have no illusions on their chances of success - many other popular principals of campuses with good-to-great state ratings have been fired over the last couple of years regardless of how large the community response was.

In 2013, three of the four principals Dallas Morning News had deemed "Super Principals" were let go.  One of them was Sunset's principal, the high school in Rosemont's feeder pattern.  I remember parents in the Sunset community being completely blindsided by the decision.  Sunset had made so many gains during his tenure.

(Read the story here:
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2013/08/three-of-our-four-annointed-super-principals-have-been-drummed-out-of-disd.html/ )

Each year there are more.  Communities come to Board meetings to protest, but to my knowledge, there has never been a reversal of the decision, except for the very recent case of the Franklin Middle School principal.

The stated goal of the Administration is to create a politics-free principal evaluation system that gets rid of promotion via cronyism and glad-handing.  I think most agree with that goal 100%.  I know I do!  But... there's always a big but, right?  But, what if the system doesn't measure what we think it measures?

As one parent said to me, maybe the system "replaced external politics with internal."

I have no "inside track", so I am just guessing here based on what I hear at Board meetings:  I wonder if the firing offense for some principals is push-back over teacher observation and evaluation requirements?  It seems to have been an issue in the Franklin case (link above).  I also found this article with a letter from one of the Super Principals to her staff in 2013.  The LOLs, DOLs, and MRSs are references to required teacher instructional techniques.  See more about that here.

It's hard to know what is going on.  It's also hard to watch yet another community be blind-sided.