Fourteen school systems around the country, including the District of Columbia and Prince George’s County (MD), will receive grants totaling $30 million to improve the effectiveness of unsung middle managers in large urban districts – those who supervise principals.
The five-year program, funded by the Wallace Foundation, is designed to help improve management in sprawling school bureaucracies.
The grants will allow school districts to restructure workloads so that supervisors have fewer principals to manage, more time to spend in schools and more ability to focus on mentoring and solving problems with their principals, said Jody Spiro, director of education leadership at Wallace.
The average supervisor – sometimes called assistant superintendents, instructional coaches or zone supervisors – oversees 24 principals, Spiro said. What’s more, most of their work is making sure that schools are complying with district, state or federal policies, bureaucratic accounting that leaves little time for meaningful interaction with principals, she said.
The grants are designed to encourage school districts to rearrange responsibilities so that others in the central office assume some of the compliance duties and supervisors have more time to spend with fewer principals.
A core group of six school districts – Long Beach (Calif.), Des Moines (Iowa), Broward County (Fla.), Minneapolis, Cleveland and DeKalb County (Ga.) – will receive four-year grants averaging about $3 million each. The foundation will spend $2.5 million on an independent evaluation of whether the grants result in more effective principals.
Wallace also is giving $700,000 to the District and $800,000 to Tulsa (Okla.) to reorganize workloads for principal supervisors and to cultivate new talent.
And it is awarding grants to six districts that are already part of an ongoing 2011 project to develop a “pipeline” of talented school principals. The six districts are Prince George’s County – which will get $700,000 – and Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina), Denver, Gwinnett County (Georgia), Hillsborough County (Fla.) and New York City. The six will receive Wallace grants ranging from $430,000 to $1 million, for a total of $4 million.
For more information, please visit: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/wallace-foundation-aims-to-help-school-leaders-get-better-donates-30-million/2014/06/23/a79fb222-fb08-11e3-8176-f2c941cf35f1_story.html?wprss=rss_education
