Matt's Education Watch: Scaling Tough Love Principals

Check out this article in the Projo. It tells a story about student achievement that we've seen before: an outstanding principal teacher uses tough love and a lot of elbow grease to turn a school around. This particular article is about Principal Robbie Torchon of Providence's Alvarez High School:

Eighteen months ago, Torchon was asked to open a new high school on the site of a former Superfund site near Reservoir Triangle. His job was to imbue the building with meaning — to create a sense of community where there was none. This was no easy task because both students and staff were plucked from high schools all over the district and many came from Harrison Street, a shell of a high school where students and staff felt abandoned.

Torchon divided the student body into teams of 130 and assigned teachers to one of five teams, which focused on school climate, data assessment, curriculum and school rules and regulations. One team looked at suspension data; another found that in classrooms where teachers were highly engaged, discipline problems were uncommon.

Throughout the first year, Torchon’s mantra was, “You are no longer guests here, you are hosts. Your diploma’s value will be based on the impressions that people have of your school.”

So this approach (lots of parental engagement, using threats of academic probation, etc.) seems to work. But the problem of course is scalability. Torchon says it himself in the article: not all schools can be this dependent on a "charismatic leader." That leaves systematic reforms that guide more effective teacher behavior, so we're talking more teacher accountability.

Activists on the ground are realizing that the logical first step is to convince teachers' unions that, yes, teachers should be explicitly required to at the least make detailed lesson plans to increase transparency.