Inexperienced but Trained
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By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: August 16, 2006
DURING her final days as principal of Public School 7 in the Bronx late
last month, Dita Wolf cleaned out her desk. She came upon a snapshot of
herself dressed up for the school’s Storybook Day as the title
character in “Casey at the Bat.” She found a photo of Pete Seeger from
the time he visited. And after she had emptied out all the other
artifacts, there remained in the bottom left drawer a hammer and wrench.
She had discovered them in the same place on the day she took over as
principal in September 1998. Her predecessor, Milton Fein, had left
them, partly because they had come in handy for hanging pictures and
fixing the movie projector, and partly as a material symbol of all else
he had given Ms. Wolf.
Mr. Fein had attended P.S. 7 himself as a boy and gone on to serve as
its principal for 27 years. For nearly half of them, Ms. Wolf worked
there as a teacher, librarian, assistant principal and heir apparent.
Through the perpetually open door of his office, from which he
routinely summoned Ms. Wolf with the shout, “Hey, Dita,” Mr. Fein had
taught her budgeting and grant writing, scheduling and programming, and
also the more undefined knack of becoming a fixture in the Kingsbridge
neighborhood.
In her years heading P.S. 7, whose student body is 97 percent nonwhite
and 83 percent low-income, Ms. Wolf steadily raised scores on citywide
reading and math tests. P.S. 7 outperformed schools with similar racial
and economic profiles. It also, in a way statistics cannot convey,
offered an unusually rich arts program, turning every corridor into a
gallery of student work.
Now Ms. Wolf has passed the mantle to an incoming principal almost
exactly half her age — 28 to Ms. Wolf’s 55. Renee Cloutier, the
successor, has taught for four years and been an assistant principal
for nine months. She does not yet have a master’s degree. What she does
have by way of pedigree is graduation from the Department of
Education’s Leadership Academy, which groomed her during the past year.
The divide between Ms. Wolf and Ms. Cloutier is more than simply
generational. It vividly illustrates a radical change in the nature of
educational leadership in New York’s public schools. The success or
failure of that change remains to be seen; the policy certainly rates
as one of the biggest gambles of Joel I. Klein’s tenure as chancellor.
Ms. Wolf embodied the traditional way of becoming a principal, rising
gradually up the career ladder and being either formally or informally
trained by a mentor. Ms. Cloutier typifies the new approach of
fast-tracking promising candidates into positions of authority. More
than a third of her classmates in the Leadership Academy had taught for
five years or less, and barely a fourth had been an assistant principal.
The upheaval in New York’s corps of 1,451 principals — more than half
have resigned or retired in five years — cannot be laid entirely to Mr.
Klein and his approach. Higher salaries in the suburbs, periodic buyout
offers and protracted periods without a new contract have all
contributed to the current situation.
The method of filling those vacancies, however, has been markedly
altered under Mr. Klein. As chancellor, he jettisoned the so-called
Distinguished Faculty program, which used veteran or newly retired
principals to nurture newly appointed ones. The Distinguished Faculty
program, which reached 500 principals for a total cost of $1.5 million,
was replaced by the $70-million Leadership Academy, which drew much of
its curriculum from corporate management training. The academy’s first
leader, Robert E. Knowling Jr., had most recently demonstrated his
leadership skills as chief executive officer of the telecommunications
company Covad, which he left $1.4 billion in debt and on the verge of
bankruptcy while he received a $1.5 million severance package.
The controversy over the academy has outlasted Mr. Knowling, who
resigned in April 2005. In its first three years, the academy has
produced 162 principals from 275 enrollees. A former Department of
Education official, Barbara Bartholomew, wrote recently in Educational
Leadership magazine that the academy was part of a misguided policy of
“disbanding an operable system that required thoughtful reform, not
dissolution.”
Sandra J. Stein, Mr. Knowling’s successor as leader of the academy,
replied on the magazine’s Web site that the program was the victim of a
“barrage of misinformation.” While acknowledging the resistance the
academy’s principals have sometimes faced, she went on, “In most cases,
this is because they represent reform.”
What the debate finally comes down to is whether people like Renee
Cloutier can do the job. In a recent interview, Ms. Cloutier projected
confidence and ambition. Her roots in education run deeper than her
résumé alone conveys; she was the niece and
protégée of a childless aunt who was a teacher and later
a principal in Hudson, N.Y.
Ms. Cloutier moved to New York immediately after graduating from
Russell Sage College in Troy in 2000. “It seemed like there was no
equity in the school system,” she said, “and I wanted to be part of
assuring that all kids got a quality education.” She taught for four
years at Public School 306 in the Bronx, a troubled school going
through a state-ordered reorganization, before becoming a literacy
coach and assistant principal.
JUDITH PETERSEN, a Leadership Academy staff member whom Ms. Cloutier
described as a mentor, wrote of her in a recent e-mail message: “I
believe that Renee has the capacity to be a leader who will work with
others to create a school where all children have access to good
instruction, every day and in every classroom.”
Still, the question is not whether Ms. Cloutier is idealistic, or
whether she is skillful in the classroom. The question is whether she
can know as much after six years in education as Dita Wolf knew in the
27 years she spent in P.S. 7 and three other Bronx schools before being
named a principal.
“I’m not hiding my age or defending my age,” Ms. Cloutier said. “It’s
all about showing I can do the work.”
In that effort, she has the advantage of inheriting a school that
already functions well. She also has inherited all of the internal
memos and reports Ms. Wolf produced last year, a kind of institutional
memory. And in the bottom left drawer of the principal’s desk remain
Milton Fein’s hammer and wrench, evidence of a continuity that will
either be preserved or ruptured in Ms. Cloutier’s hands.
“Look, I’m hoping that Renee is going to succeed,” Ms. Wolf put it.
“Because if she doesn’t, then years of my life go down the tubes. And
that’s something I don’t want to see.”