Contact: Kaylen Tucker, NAESP
703-518-6257
ktucker@naesp.org

Statement of Gail Connelly, executive director, National Association of Elementary School Principals, and JoAnn Bartoletti, executive director, National Association of Secondary School Principals in response to “The Irreplaceables: Understanding the Real Retention Crisis in America’s Urban Schools”

August 2, 2012—The assertion in the TNTP report “The Irreplaceables" that principals do not take aggressive action to retain excellent teachers and counsel low-performers out of the classroom is inherently flawed.

The facts, supported by years of independent research from a variety of sources, notably the Wallace Foundation, point to quite different findings: Most of the nation’s 95,000-plus K-12 public school principals lack the direct authority to hire, fire, and promote teachers. As a result, excellent teachers often are forced to move on to move up, and ineffective teachers are protected by multi-layered, drawn-out personnel policies. (Interestingly, the TNTP survey focused on 90,000 teachers in four urban districts—a scant 2.8 percent of the nation’s 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers.)

Principals strive to create comprehensive learning communities, where all students and teachers are supported and encouraged to reach their highest potential. An important reality of leading such a culture is exercising the flexibility and authority to support and mentor teaching staff.

NAESP and NASSP have long been advocates for sensible, straightforward solutions that support principals’ ability to nurture successful school cultures and for policies that support this vitally important responsibility:

First, give principals the authority to fire incompetent teachers, hire promising teachers, and promote excellent teachers. Of course, these actions must be unassailable—focused on building capacity of all employees and grounded in fair due process. Fair due process, however, shouldn’t mean no process.

Second, define “teaching excellence” accurately. It’s long past time to throw out the misguided, narrow, and plain wrong approach to determining anyone’s success—students, teachers, and principals—based on standardized test scores. Unfortunately, the TNTP report perpetuates the faulty notion that the best teachers can be identified by their students’ scores on these computerized, “fill in the bubble” tests. Every educator—including the critics—knows that standardized tests often measure factors that aren’t even remotely related to teaching or learning—hunger, ill-health, excitement about a pending field trip, a troubled home situation, or a bad morning on the school bus—which leads to inaccurate judgments that can haunt a student’s academic experience and ruin an educator’s career. The best teachers deserve to be evaluated using the best measures—a combination of both quantitative and qualitative assessments.

Finally, we must call a halt to the blame game, where educators—and researchers—look for scapegoats instead of solutions. Nationally, association representatives, elected leaders, policymakers, and the media set the tone of the conversation about public education. Will the conversation move us forward, or will it divide us along fault lines? Locally, every person inside the orbit of a neighborhood school is invested in and dependent upon its success. Will we acknowledge the positive role that most public schools have in building our cities and towns and strive to make them better, or will we continue to paint all schools and educators with the same tarry brush?

Let’s get serious about strengthening all schools and all educators, celebrating the high-performing ones, bolstering the underperforming ones and, yes, ousting those who ultimately cannot measure up. Most important, let’s remember that public education plays an undeniable role in sustaining our nation, and give credit to the unsung heroes—teachers and principals—who teach, guide, mentor, and support our children and young people.