The majority of the District of Columbia’s newest principals will be familiar faces, with 12 of the system’s 19 vacancies filled by people with experience working in the city’s schools.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who was hand-picked for the job earlier this summer by Mayor Adrian Fenty, promised a national search aimed at eventually attracting the best possible principal candidates.
But so far, the principals chosen by Rhee have “not been so different from other years,” said Mary Levy, a schools expert with the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
Rhee has said there was not enough time to complete the recruitment she envisions by the beginning of this school year later this month.
The principals hired for this school term are in the uneasy position of knowing they may be replaced as Rhee’s nationwide search for new hires unfolds.
For Rhee, the selection process provides an early test of whether she will reverse the dismal tide of public education in the city’s 145 public schools, education officials and experts said Tuesday. At least five of D.C.’s newest principals are graduates of New Leaders for New Schools, an intensive yearlong program to train educators to lead schools.
Rhee has some deep connections with the program, having chosen its Memphis director, Billy Kearney, to join her transition team.
How principals fare will depend on their ability to adapt to each school community and their support from the central office, which has been notorious for leaving educators stranded in the field, Levy said.
Monica Taylor, a 2006 New Leaders graduate, will take over at Eastern Senior High, a majority-black, low-income school where a former principal was fired last year after a scuffle with a student.
Taylor earned plaudits for her tenure as an assistant principal at Calvin Coolidge Senior High, which is also majority-black and in a working-class community. Taylor was a strong leader who was accountable for the quality of the school, Coolidge Parents and Teachers Association President Terry Goings said.
Incoming Murch Elementary Principal Brenda Lewis, a former principal at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Red Wing, Minn., will have to live up to parents’ rigorous expectations of the school, which is located in prestigious Ward 3.
“Some schools are easier than others,” Levy said. “At Murch, you have to please the parents … because they have clout.”
