The Enormous Efforts To Retain Young Principals in Dallas

Ashley Toole (Dallas–Fort Worth ’11), 27, is a first-year vice principal at Spruce. She can tick off the school’s challenges like a shopping list—high student and teacher absences, inadequate mental health and other supports—but she thrives on finding solutions, and aspires to be a principal at a school equally in need of strong leadership. “I love the chaos,” says Toole, an athlete whose flag football team is tops in its league. “Especially when you can somehow make sense of it.”

This year, Toole has helped her colleagues—an almost entirely new leadership team under the direction of veteran principal (and Toole’s mentor) Danielle Petters— bring a measure of stability to the school. After three special education department chairs quit in the first half of this school year, Toole reshaped the department to assign leadership across the team. She led a group of teachers to create a new system that reduced the number of students late to class by nearly 90 percent from January to March. During those same months, she coached teachers and staff (there are 30 on her caseload), counseled students, met with parents.

All day, every day, she was on. But when spring break came in April, Toole shut down her hyperdrive. She spent time with family. She read books instead of emails. She felt like herself again.

Toole shows promise of becoming a strong principal, the kind districts and networks expend major time and expense trying to hire and retain. (School Leaders Network estimates it costs $75,000 to hire and onboard a principal.) But when she came back from break, she balked. For the first time, she considered not returning in the fall. “Maybe this just isn’t sustainable," she thought. "Is what I’m doing every day even having the impact that’s worth all the work?”

In Dallas and around the country, educators are trying to find ways to help promising leaders like Toole not just enter the principal pipeline but also stay in principal jobs once they get there. Research shows that it takes five years for a principal to build an effective staff and institutionalize the policies and practices needed to elevate instruction and school culture.

But fewer and fewer principals are sticking around for that long. A study by the University Council for Education Administration, made up of education scholars nationwide, found that nearly 50 percent of Texas’s high school principals leave the position by the end of their third year (compared to about 40 percent at elementary schools). And while there is less data on vice principal turnover, at Spruce High School, 11 people have shuffled through five vice principal jobs since November 2014.

At schools serving high-need communities, the principal retention problem is greater still. The same study found principal tenure is lowest at schools with poor academic achievement and higher rates of poverty. Among the reasons principals cite for quitting are the isolation of their jobs; greater pressure to lead and make drastic improvements to instruction, without relief from administrative chores; and a lack of ongoing professional development and coaching from their supervisors. The weight of their responsibilities—to teachers, to district leaders, and most of all to students and their families— can be crushing.

Whatever the reason for a principal’s early exit, kids tend to lose, at least in the short term. According to a RAND Education study, students at the vast majority of schools with new principals underperformed compared to the prior year.

Some worry that a short tenure is becoming accepted practice. “If you have been a three- or four-year principal, everyone says that’s amazing,” says Yasmin Bhatia, CEO of Uplift Education, the largest charter school network in the Dallas area. “Our mindset instead should be that that’s the minimum to get this right.”

That’s part of the reason why, in Dallas and Fort Worth, a number of loosely connected organizations—including the nonprofit Teaching Trust, the Uplift school network, and the Teach For America–Dallas–Fort Worth region— have joined forces in a collective effort to develop and coach aspiring and current principals, band them together to overcome challenges, and support them to persist long enough to improve student outcomes.

Principal turnover is a problem nationwide, and the Dallas area isn’t alone in its attempts to fix it.

Among the efforts being closely watched is the Chicago Principals Fellowship, an executive leadership effort aimed at retaining 60 of Chicago’s top principals. After finding that 6 in 10 principals in the city leave their roles within five years, The Chicago Public Education Fund raised $20 million in 2012 for this effort to hire and retain top principals.

In Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey, and expanding to other cities, TNTP’s Pathway to Leadership in Urban Schools (PLUS) is providing aspiring principals with on-the-job training, leadership coaching, and hands-on practice in schools.

New Leaders has trained more than 1,600 school leaders since its founding in 2000 and now works in 15 urban districts and more than 100 charter schools nationwide. And a RAND Corporation report released in April anticipates more principal prep efforts to come. The report maps how states and districts can collect funding from the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) for school-leader improvement efforts.

Back in Dallas, the TFA–DFW region has become one of the first to offer fellowships for aspiring school leaders, including vice principals and teacher leaders, and executive coaching for alumni principals. As a member of the fellowship, Ashley Toole gets together each month with about 20 alumni colleagues for professional development sessions or school observation visits. While it takes up only a small part of her schedule, she brings what she learns back to her colleagues at Spruce, and it feeds her hunger to improve at her job. “It makes me want to keep growing and getting better, staying on and honing this craft,” she says.

Toole is also participating in a program created by Teaching Trust and Southern Methodist University’s Simmons School of Education and Human Development as a way to walk school leaders to that magic five-year mark. (TFA–DFW works closely with Teaching Trust to recruit alumni.) Teaching Trust, led by Patrick Haugh (N.Y. ’98), and SMU offer Toole and other aspiring school leaders a two-year nights-and-weekends master’s program, including a residency year, and three years of on-the-job coaching.

Samina Noorani (Colorado ’09), 29, is a first-year high school principal at Uplift Peak Preparatory. Uplift Education, a charter network since 1996, is a third arm of this unofficial Dallas-area principal retention brigade. More than 40 Teach For America alumni are principals or deans within the network, which is trying to stanch principal outflow by building in more supports and offering financial incentives.

In 2012, the Uplift network gave principals some relief by hiring an operations director to oversee all non instructional staff on each campus. Uplift still had a problem retaining principals, though, so in 2014, it committed to providing greater incentives: more and better professional development, structured opportunities for principals to collaborate and feel less isolated on the job, and, new this year, a $25,000 “tenacity” bonus for principals who are judged proficient for at least five years.

So far, just two of Uplift’s 34 principals have been in their jobs long enough to be eligible for the bonus. But stability is improving across the board. As of May, Uplift had seven openings for school leaders and deans for the 2016-17 school year, compared to 19 openings at the same time last year.

As Noorani begins her principal’s career with Uplift, she is taking advantage of everything Dallas’s informal principal retention collective offers. She gets executive coaching from TFA–DFW. Like Toole, she is in the third year of the Teaching Trust five-year master’s degree and coaching program. And she’s benefitting from her charter network’s ramped-up principal retention effort.

Noorani’s desire to be an educator and a principal are rooted in her family history. Her parents immigrated to New York from Pakistan in the 1970s. Both held finance degrees from a Pakistani university, but their credentials didn’t transfer to the U.S. For their two daughters, they dreamed of greater stability. “My parents constantly drove into us that formal higher education is really important,” Noorani says. “Being able to remember where my family came from is very powerful to me, and I love to be able to share that with students.”

The school Noorani leads serves about 400 students in grades 9-12 on a modern campus about a mile northeast of downtown Dallas. About 90 percent of the students at Peak are Latino, and the vast majority qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Their academic outcomes outpace their peers in the region. Every senior has been accepted to at least one college. Of Peak’s 2010 graduating class, 15 percent have graduated from college and 65 percent are still working toward a degree.

Whereas Ashley Toole is trying to stabilize Spruce, Noorani has a different challenge at Peak, where she is trying to move student outcomes from stable to solid. “Samina is trying to figure out how to get more kids to get a three, a four, a five on an AP exam,” says Bhatia, Uplift’s CEO. “She might be stressing because 30 percent of her kids have a college-ready ACT score. That’s versus 18 percent statewide, but she wants to get it to 50 percent.”

Noorani’s Outlook calendar is a rainbow of color-coded projects and appointments from morning to night for weeks ahead. She carries a red diary filled with notes, ideas, and observations, written with font-like precision.

On a spring morning, as she sat behind a desk piled with books about team building, she discussed a few of the balls she’s juggling: upcoming end-of-year testing, AP exams, seniors who need more credits, summer school plans, and a looming list of end-of-year teacher evaluations to complete. Plus, there was much more work to do on a project the school had been tackling for more than a year: becoming authorized as an International Baccalaureate Diploma Program school (the campus is already an authorized Middle Years Program school, for grades 6-10).

As attention to principal development has increased, so has attention to the role of the principal’s supervisor. Traditionally, supervisors have acted as mediators between the principal and the district, ensuring compliance with district expectations. But recent research, much of it coming from the University of Washington’s District Leadership Design Lab, shows that schools benefit when principals have a coach rather than a compliance officer.

If Noorani has one ace in the hole, it’s her supervisor. Remy Washington was the principal at a large International Baccalaureate high school in Chicago before moving to Dallas to join Uplift. She had Noorani’s job as Peak Prep high school principal from 2013 to 2015. If something goes wrong, Washington is the first person Noorani calls. If all is going well, the two plan ahead. Washington is tuned in to Noorani’s strengths and weaknesses on a granular level. Her most important responsibility is to make sure Noorani stays in her job for at least several years and improves.

“I tell her we can talk all night long if she needs to,” Washington says. “To have a thought partner, someone who can be really responsive, is really helpful.”

Noorani has proved herself as a remarkable teacher. At her Denver placement school, she led a classroom for 14- to 21-year-old students in need of significant credit recovery—still the hardest job she’s ever had, she says. As a principal, though, she has struggled to find her comfort zone as a leader, and to be seen as one by her deans and department chairs.

Early in the year, she assigned some deans and teacher leaders the task of preparing departmental priorities in line with her vision as an International Baccalaureate school. She wanted her staff to collaborate and feel invested in the project, so she gave departments free rein to complete the work. Behind the scenes, Washington saw that it wasn’t working. Few felt invested, and the project wasn’t getting done. She told Noorani four times to change her approach—to be more directive. Finally, Noorani did, and it worked. “This is how you build credibility with your team,” Washington told her.

Washington’s feedback has changed how Noorani interacts with her staff, especially her deans. “Before, I would say, ‘I did it, so why can’t they do it?’” she says, recalling her own time in the position. “[Washington] said you can’t keep comparing what you can do to what others can do. You have to see people for what their capacity is and what it can be."

Noorani credits some of her on-the-job strengths, including organization and instructional leadership, to the help she’s gotten from SMU and Teaching Trust, where 47 of the 115 participants in its five year program are Teach For America alumni.

The way the program works is that over the first two years, participants earn a master’s degree, as both Toole and Noorani did. During the second year, participants experience an intensive, yearlong residency in which they serve in a school leadership role and receive extensive coaching and support. Years three through five include coaching, assessment, and support tailored to where participants are on their leadership path. The five-year commitment comes with a financial benefit: Graduates pay only $10,000 for a master’s degree and mentoring valued at about $50,000.

Teaching Trust fellows focus on challenges unique to urban and under-resourced schools, and on helping school leaders build the interpersonal skills to motivate teachers and staff members—and themselves—to stay in their jobs long term. Co-founder Rosemary Perlmeter is a professor at SMU and a Teaching Trust instructor. (Perlmeter also founded the Uplift charter network in 1996.) She says, “The reality is, if you look at places where [leaders] have made the most fundamental changes—civil rights, international disease control—nobody has ever done that in a couple of years’ time.”

Teaching Trust also coaches whole-school leadership teams to improve culture and instruction. One of those teams is Toole and her colleagues at Spruce High School.

Toole credits Teaching Trust with sharpening her skills for “the most important stuff,” which is not dousing the day-to-day fires but building a strong school culture so that fires don’t start. Toole is intent on learning to build the kind of culture, she says, that “comes when students engage,” and students feel as deeply invested as any principal.

After spring break, when Toole was considering leaving Spruce, her principal noticed the change in her demeanor almost immediately. They talked openly. She reminded Toole of her many successes— of the students and teachers thriving because of her work.

A colleague and veteran vice principal assured Toole she would learn to manage the struggle. “It makes it easier to know that someone with similar values and mindset and work ethic doesn’t feel the kinds of emotional stress and drain that she used to,” Toole says. “She still works late and produces impressive outcomes, it’s just not as emotionally draining.” Within a few days, Toole says, she “got back in the groove.”

That’s no small thing for an aspiring principal, says Perlmeter, Teaching Trust’s co-founder. “When you talk about social-emotional health,” she says, “or social justice, or any of the progressive things that most people who come into this work care about, we have almost zero chance of offering them to kids if we don’t build some sustainability in the profession.”

Making the Move - Whitney Harris

In late 2013, Whitney Harris (St. Louis ’11) was an English teacher at a high school in St. Louis finishing up a master’s degree. She liked St. Louis, but when she heard about a free trip for Teach For America alumni interested in pursuing school leadership, offered by the Dallas–Fort Worth region, she thought, “Why not?”

Today, Harris is the dean of students at Dallas’s Uplift Peak Preparatory and a testament to TFA–DFW’s relentless school leader recruitment and development efforts.

The metro area’s demand for high-performing principals and vice principals far exceeds its supply, says Rodrigo Musuruana (Milwaukee ’11). He runs “Destined For DFW,” an all-expenses-paid weekend tailored to educators like Harris (and the model for similar alumni recruitment efforts in regions including Jacksonville and St. Louis). In April, it attracted 22 potential transplants, most of whom have principal certifications.

Alumni visit district and charter schools (the program partners with the Dallas and Fort Worth districts as well as KIPP–DFW and Uplift Education). They have job interviews. And they’re given the hard sell with perks like the city’s best Tex-Mex food. This year, the region hopes at least 10 participants will return to the metro area in moving vans, joining 103 alums already working as principals, vice principals, and instructional coaches.

For Harris, the move has meant an opportunity to work for a charter network, Uplift Education, known for its development of deans and principals. She genuinely likes her job and wants to stay in mid-level leadership. At some point in her career, though, she hopes to work at a district school and “with kids whom I identify with racially.”

Harris is a reminder that keeping school leaders in a region takes more than just attracting them. “I’m not planning on moving,” she says. But like many young professionals, she’s not tied to Dallas by responsibilities outside of school. For the foreseeable future, she’s focused on Peak. Still, she says, “I’m always open.”

Resources for School Leaders

Numerous school districts and government and nonprofit organizations have published research reports, briefings, and resources designed to support and retain strong school leaders in their jobs. Recent publications include:

• The Chicago Public Education Fund published “Chicago’s Fight to Keep Top Principals, 2015 School Leadership Report,” which includes survey results on the needs of top principals and broadly applicable recommendations for retaining school leaders.
• TNTP operates the Pathway to Leadership in Urban Schools initiative, which currently trains principals in Camden, Philadelphia, and San Francisco. In addition to information on its website, the organization publishes regular updates on its TNTP Blog, including a February post on “The Real Impact of Principal Turnover.”
• The Wallace Foundation has published a series of research reports and resource documents on the “School Leadership” section of its website. In April, the foundation posted the first volume of a report from RAND on “School Leadership Interventions Under the Every Student Succeeds Act,” which details major ESSA funding programs that can be used to pay for school leadership improvement efforts.