The Department of Education’s tools to assess schools are falling out of favor with New York City principals, according to results of the city’s most recent survey of school leaders. Instead, principals are getting behind new reforms that are aimed to strengthen individual students and teachers.
Released this week, the findings are based on principals’ responses to the ninth round of the survey, known as the Principal Satisfaction Survey. Since 2007, the education department has administered the surveys to principals to get feedback about the support they are receiving.
Overall, about three out of four principals said they were generally happy with how the city helps them do their jobs, slightly more than last year but lower than in 2009, when an all-time high of more than 80 percent of principals said they were satisfied. But the department initiatives that won the strongest approval have shifted, and principals reported being much less happy with the support they receive for students with disabilities.
In the past, the survey has also polled principals on their satisfaction with the chancellor and the Panel for Educational Policy, the school board that has never rejected a city proposal. But those questions were not on the survey when it was administered at the end of 2011-2012 school year.
City officials said they removed a third of the survey’s questions this year in an effort to reduce principals’ administrative workload, something Chancellor Dennis Walcott promised to do when he first took office last year. Officials said questions were cut for a host of reasons: Some get asked in other surveys or are no longer relevant, others had elicited the same responses over time, and others yet do not led to “actionable feedback,” according to the department’s presentation about the survey results.
The results show that, compared to two years ago, a smaller share of principals are satisfied with the city’s more established accountability tools. In 2010, 65 percent of principals said they considered the city’s Quality Review and its Progress Reports helpful tools in improving student outcomes. This year, those satisfaction rates fell to 55 percent and 57 percent, respectively. Quality reviews examine how schools function as organizations, while progress reports crunch student performance data to measure how well each school is doing compared to other schools like it.
The trends were similar when principals were asked to evaluate the assessments as tools to improve teacher practice. Satisfaction slumped from 62 percent to 53 percent for the progress reports and 68 percent to 60 percent for the quality reviews, according to the data.
In contrast, the principals were more optimistic about newer reforms. Three out of four responding principals said they believed the Common Core standards, which are rolling out this year, would lead to better student outcomes. The same proportion said they thought more meaningful teacher observations, which are required under state law to be adopted in the future, would improve teacher practice.
But their responses to questions about the department’s support for special education services suggested that not all felt prepared for a third focus of the new school year, special education reforms meant to include more students with disabilities in general education classes. Just 71 percent of principals said they were satisfied with the professional development they were getting around special education, and even fewer — 65 percent — said they were happy with the technical support they received, including about the first phase of the reforms. The previous year, nearly three quarters of principals said they were happy with the department’s special education supports.
For the seventh straight time, at least 90 percent of the principals said they were satisfied with the support provided to them by the networks that they partner with to receive administrative support. The level of support has remained consistent even as the city has reshuffled the structure of the support groups.
Principals’ response rate to the questionnaire was the lowest since the Department of Education first administered the anonymous survey in 2007. Just 76 percent of the 1,568 principals that the city asked to fill out surveys responded, down from 90 percent just a year ago.
City officials said one reason the response rate was lower this year was that the survey was distributed only once, instead of multiple times, in a move also meant to reduce principals’ workload.
The department’s presentation about the latest principal survey results is below.