TeacherScribe

This is a piece from Learning Matters. It again focuses on Michelle Rhee as she tries to find principals to fix the DC school district.

This one focuses on Darrin Slade, a principal at Ron Brown middle school. Sounds like an interesting guy.

Slade's approach to working with teachers and kids is the personification of how to fix schools. As the clip shows, he is constantly visible. He lives and breathes that school.

Some friends who bash poor teaching always claim that tenure prevents administrators from firing bad teachers. While I can't discount that, I will simply reiterate what Rhee has stated again and again, her administrators allow poor teaching to go on because most a conflict adverse. They are scared to hold failing teachers accountable.

Darrin Slade isn't. His constant presence is a fine example.

Get in the rooms and call bad teachers out on the carpet. While that might not fix every bad teacher, I just fail to see how any professional with any shred of pride and dignity and sense of self preservation would not respond to that!

But as he says, the hardest part about improving a school is improving test scores and getting teachers to do their jobs to their full potential. To remedy this, Slade has a constant presence, not only observing teachers and sitting in on classes but also teaching some classes. Of course, he checks to make sure teachers' lessons are geared toward skills and knowledge that will be tested - and that makes me cringe - but he has seized his school by the gruff of the neck and is in control.

That - at least it seems to me - is how you fix a failing school.