The autonomy I am interested in seeing comes in the form of whether principals are going to be able to truly hire their own staff. Every year they have job fairs and some teachers actually are interviewed by principals, but there are also hundreds who are just slotted to schools. Since this is only tangentially related to budgets, I wonder if a principal is going to be flat out able to send someone back if that person isn't what the principal is looking for. If they have to accept teachers they don't want, it seems like none of this budget freedom is going to matter.

Principals should be able to do their own recruiting, find someone they think is going to help student learning, and then send the person to HR to to take care of all of the paperwork.

Dr. Alonso said, "If you can trust a principal with 400 kids but not with a spreadsheet, it doesn't compute." Once again, he fails to acknowledge the important role played by teachers. I know of several schools who are sustained more by the skill and dedication of the teaching and support staff than by the administration. I would even say that they do it IN SPITE of the administration.

For Alonso's plan to work, there are many, many principals who are going to have to receive a great deal of support. In addition, they need to have strong, active SITs, something that is sorely lacking in many schools.

Having experienced some fairly awful principals in the past in the BCPSS (from the point of view of a parent) this seems pretty scary. Supposedly they'll be held "accountable" but I'm not sure if there's universal agreement on what makes a good principal. I want to see a principal that truly welcomes students with different needs - whether gifted and talented or special ed. I want to feel like my interest and questions about the school are welcomed as an involved parent, not something that labels me as difficult. I want a principal that supports great teachers and gives them freedom to generate excitement in their classes. I want a principal that works with teachers to become competent and does not try to hide their problems or deny them. If the competence of principals is judged solely in terms of MSA scores I don't think North Ave would agree with me about those awful principals.

"If you can trust a principal with 400 kids but not with a spreadsheet, it doesn't compute".

I don't believe for one second that just because a principal is capable of being responsible for 400 children it automatically qualifies them to manage a budget (or a "spreadsheet" if you want to completely undervalue the importance of it).

I started out with a lot of faith in Dr. Alonso, but this comment and outlook is just so naive. I am in full support of giving principals more funding and autonomy to run their schools, but I am also concerned about the position we will be left in when the honeymoon is over. I really feel for the principals who have expressed a concern that they are being set up to fail. I don't feel that North Ave is ready to provide the budget and decision making assistance needed to make sure this is a success. cfr makes an excellent point about the definition of a "good principal" - what if half of our principals fall below expectation? Where does the responsibility fall then? I also agree with avalon, Dr. Alonso seems to be ignoring the supportive role of the teachers. For some, their roles may become even more stressful if there isn't a solid principal in place to begin with. The isolation that this new form of diluted self-management may bring with it could result in even more teacher vacancies at BCPSS.

I also feel that this model unfairly takes the heat off North Ave. If a school performs poorly, the principal is blamed and is removed. When does North Ave's responsibility come into play?

Since two people have commented about Dr. Alonso's quote about principals needing to be able to balance a spreadsheet if they're to be trusted with kids, I thought I'd post what he said after that (a continuation of the quote that was cut out of my story for space restrictions): "If the principal can't balance a checkbook, the principal should be smart enough to find somebody who can." Maybe a teacher? I don't know. But I just figured I'd throw it out there to add a little more context to the converation.

A couple of thoughts:

1) Mr. Alonso talks about autonomy, how about allowing principals more flexibility to suspend students?

2) Under Mr. Alonso's proposal, principals should bear the responsibility of either balancing the budget themselves or hiring a qualified person (an accountant). For Mr. Alonso to claim that handling students is analogous to balancing a budget, he demonstrates naivite. I certainly would not want Mr. Alonso to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve simply because he is CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools.

This is expected and will be a good thing for the schools with good principals in the district, but, as someone who has seen some really bad ones in my time here, it's also pretty darn scary. What will the oversight be? Can each school have an oversight committee that is comprised of teachers and parents? Will budgets of schools now be public record?

I have been in situations when I was a teacher with competent principals and incompetent principals. The good ones knew how to be good academic leaders who held themselves and their faculties responsible for the general day-to-day running of the school. On the other hand, there were the ones who would abuse the responsibilites of their position and bullied and harassed the staff to no end. I had a principal who falsified attendance documents for the old state standards prior to the new ones, and when she was caught was allowed to spend the rest of her time behind a desk in an office instead of being fired. For most people, accountability is not something you are born with; you must learn it. There has to be some serious training all around before this is even implemented. This is where the school system falls short whether for implementation of new instructional strategies or managing a school with personnel, budget, and whatever else goes with it. I have seen overcrowded schools with vital space going out the window, e.g. media center disappears, for the sake of the extra dollar as attributed to the per pupil rate which is now $13,000 per student. Schools should be at capacity as cited by the City Fire Department with students and personnel, not over populated. Parents need to be on top of what is going on in the building especially when the extras are being sacrificed for the basics. The basics are enhanced with art, music, PE, etc. If the subjects were truly integrated, students could see the relationships that do exist among all subjects. There was a big push in the early eighties to have every student from middle to high school learn a foreign language. Studies had shown that learning a foreign language helped the native language skills of the students. Now it seems, that learning a language has been relegated to the senior high school academic programs. We have problems with children who are at-risk with their health because of lack of exercise, but the PE programs have been scaled back as well as the home ec courses that were available to teach nutrition and how to take care of oneself (life skills). Art and music go back and forth with being taught. The transient rate of students is close to 50% and not having a uniform curriculum will cause havoc with these students. It is possible to have a standard curriculum and still maintain academic freedom in how it is taught. I taught CPR in a hospital for six years. The curriculum was set, but I had a great deal of freeedom to present the material because the coursework was designed for specific outcomes which could be tested, and the success rate of this approach was high. It all goes back to reliability and validity of goals, outcomes, and reults.

If there are clear guidelines in how to manage a school and training to go with it, there should not be a problem. If things are done systematically with checks and balances, including support from people in the main office who know what they are doing, it should work out for everyone. The system's problem, in the past, was not to fully support any initiative that was started, and then expect people to accomplish the impossible.

I feel compelled to comment on the context found in this article in reference to giving principals more autonomy to run their schools. After having worked in schools and central office for 37 years, I could never figure out the $90.00 per students. My conclusion is from observations, and that is way over crowed classrooms, severe lacking in pertinent needs to enhance the concepts and principles in the curriculum. The majority of the science teachers had to always purchase basic things to complete or even make a lesson have quality. Lab materials in almost every high school were so outdated and unfit to perform any given lab suggestions written in the curriculum. I could go on-and-on about the malfunctioning observed during my tenure. Nonetheless, principals should be made to share an itemized spreadsheet with their staff. As stated, I NEVER could figure out any money per child. It certainly DID NOT reflect what was in the classroom. My final thought at the moment, is that Baltimore City continues to hire outsiders to run such a corrupt and malfunctioning system, until each time, instead of seeing progress, nothing but regression. My REAL commendations are for the classroom teachers. Unfortunately, in all articles, very rarely teachers are being "thanked, recognized or even having a part of the solution."
The most realistic suggestion for such a dysfunctional system is to ALLOW the individuals who really knows the problem to help with the solutions to solve the problems. It doesn't take much to figure out who might these individuals be??? Oh well, maybe it does. Too often, it has appeared that one doesn't, but THEY are your teachers (closest to the students needs) and secondly, the school based administrators.
In this article, it also mentioned hiring retired principals, budget people, etc, but, NEVER mentioned a TEACHER?????
My sympathy truly goes out to school based employees.

Having been critical of Mr. Alonso, I would like to give him credit for this initiative. In order for it to be successful, there must be transparency in the process--principals should explain and defend the allocation of funds. Assuming the system works, principals should be discouraged from spending money on questionable practices sold by dubious consultants.