Dallas ISD Reform Program Receives Top Scores

The National Center for Educational Accountability has given Dallas Achieves, the Dallas ISD effort to turn itself into one of the country's best large city school systems, high marks.

While noting that the district still has much work to do, a report by the Austin-based center stated: "Dallas ISD seems to be engaged in precisely the type of work that [researchers] argue is the most challenging - and potentially profitable - in school reform."

The report notes that the district has made commendable strides in developing and training principals to be "instructional leaders" of their schools, deploying expert teachers to low-performing schools as "coaches" and providing training that targets teachers' weaknesses. The report was compiled after two weeks of interviews with dozens of district teachers, principals and administrators.

Citation from Texas Government Insider

Dallas Morning News, The (TX) - New Way for DISD Principals: Instruction watchdogs, not building managers, wanted under Hinojosa

by: KENT FISCHER Staff Writer/Published: January 7, 2007

Dallas schools Superintendent Michael Hinojosa has staked his job on transforming DISD into one of the nation's best urban districts by 2010. Essentially, he wants to double the academic performance of students by then.

But while Dr. Hinojosa has publicly set that ambitious goal to boost test scores, among other measures of success, it's his 225 principals who will largely be responsible for making it a reality.

So the Dallas Independent School District is re-engineering the principal's job. Gone is the focus on campus operations and administration. Student learning is now the chief concern. Principals are to be curriculum hawks and instructional coaches, responsible for identifying their schools' academic shortcomings and devising ways for teachers to address them.

The bureaucratic tasks and paper-pushing requirements of running a school are being delegated to assistants and office staff.

"The job description has really changed," said Jennifer Parvin, principal at Arturo Salazar Elementary School. "It's my job to go into classrooms and make judgments on how we can improve."

It may sound like common sense: making principals accountable for the instruction on campus. But those who study education say that's often not the case, and that's a problem.

"In urban districts, principals have typically been building managers," said Dan Katzir, who heads up programs for the recruitment and training of principals for the Broad Foundation, a California philanthropy with a prominent voice in urban school reform.

But merely saying principals must now focus on learning isn't enough to ensure that it happens, DISD administrators said. So they've got several new projects and requirements aimed at giving principals the tools they need to implement Dr. Hinojosa's objective:

• Principals must now spend at least two days a week observing teachers in classrooms to ensure that students are being challenged with deep and meaningful lessons.
• DISD is demanding an additional 10 working days from principals, days devoted to being trained on the district's revamped curriculum and on analyzing test scores to identify weaknesses in teaching.
• The district also has a new principal incentive plan. Principals showing student academic gains can earn substantial cash bonuses; those who don't can be terminated more easily.

*The district also has completely dismantled its principal recruitment and hiring process. Now, a greater emphasis is put on a job candidate's teaching background and ability to spot problems in schools and propose solutions.

"We really needed to change how principals viewed leading and learning," said Steve Flores, a DISD deputy superintendent in charge of many of the principal changes.

"We realize that this is a learning year for all of us, and there are some [principals] who are looking at these changes and are saying, 'This is not my forte.' That's OK for now. But two or three years from now, it's got to be [their forte]."

The new emphasis on instructional leadership doesn't mean principals are exempt from managing their campuses. They're still in charge of their building budgets and associated spending, for example. But the classroom is their priority.