Twenty-Two Minutes and a Hallway
Grade-3 reading proficiency on the winter benchmark is 41% at Lincoln Elementary and 78% at Jefferson Elementary -- a gap that has widened for three years. Lincoln serves 88% economically disadvantaged students and 34% English learners; its principal is in year one. Walkthroughs show teachers using the adopted core program for the full 90-minute block, but time-and-motion notes show 22 minutes a day lost to transitions and materials management. Tier 2 is one paraprofessional pulling nine students in the hallway. Data meetings are monthly and consist of entering scores into the platform. Jefferson's principal runs 20-minute common formative assessment meetings every three weeks. You have $215,000 in Title I carryover and 14 weeks left in the year.
1. What do you examine in the first two weeks, and what evidence would change your diagnosis?
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Distinguish three possible causes before committing resources: curriculum, instruction, and system.
Gather in two weeks:
- Fifteen-minute walkthroughs in every grade-3 classroom plus a look at actual student work and tasks -- not teacher behavior. The question is what students are being asked to read, write, and discuss, and whether the task matches the standard.
- A timed block audit in four classrooms to confirm where the 22 minutes go and whether it is the same in every room.
- Item-level benchmark analysis by standard and subgroup, plus a check on the cut score and composite construction. A 41% that is largely a threshold artifact is a different problem from a 41% that reflects undeveloped decoding.
- Eight to ten teacher interviews and the master schedule, to see how intervention time is actually protected.
- Jefferson as a mechanism, not a model. Do not import their program; isolate the variable -- a three-week CFA cycle with reteach -- and ask whether it is the assessment use or the leadership that produces the result.
What would change the diagnosis:
- If Lincoln's students are making normal year-over-year progress and the gap is a cohort or entry-level effect, the target is acceleration, not instructional repair.
- If Tier 1 tasks are rigorous and time is largely protected, the problem is MTSS and intervention, not the core block.
- If the program is being used exactly as designed but is misaligned to the standards, the problem is a curriculum adoption failure and no amount of coaching will fix it.
Say which one you believe before you spend a dollar.
2. Outline your 90-day plan. What do you start, what do you stop, and how is the $215,000 spent?
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Start
- A protected 30-minute intervention block in the master schedule with flexible, skill-based grouping and a defined intervention curriculum -- not the core program again, harder.
- Weekly 45-minute grade-level team meetings built around a common formative assessment protocol (borrowed structurally from Jefferson, adapted to Lincoln's students).
- A literacy coach three days a week at Lincoln, with a coaching log you review.
- Principal development: weekly co-observation with you.
Stop
- Hallway pull-out as the Tier 2 model; it is unsupervised, stigmatizing, and unmeasured.
- Data meetings that are data entry. If a meeting does not change next week's grouping, cancel it.
- Whole-class reteaching as the default response to low scores.
Spend, with a one-time-money rule
- Coaching contract through June (one-time), intervention materials, substitute days so teams can meet, and a summer planning stipend. Nothing that creates a permanent FTE you cannot fund in year two. A $215K carryover that buys four teachers for fourteen weeks and then disappears is worse than no money at all.
Measure weekly: minutes of uninterrupted Tier 1, percentage of students by tier, and curriculum-based measurement growth. Report to the board monthly in one page.
3. How do you lead a first-year principal through this without taking over the building?
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Build capability, not dependence.
- Clarify the role explicitly. You are the supervisor, not a co-principal. Say that out loud; ambiguity here is what makes first-year principals either hide problems or wait for rescue.
- Run rounds together, then hand over the feedback. For the first month you observe side by side with a shared look-fors tool. By month two the principal delivers the feedback to teachers and you observe the feedback. If you give the hard message in front of staff, you have taught the faculty that the principal is not in charge, and you will be doing it for three years.
- Agree on three non-negotiables -- the intervention block is protected, every grade-3 team meets weekly, and every student has a documented tier -- and let everything else be negotiable. New principals drown in undifferentiated expectations.
- Shield, don't smother. Route board and parent complaints about Lincoln to yourself for the first semester unless they are about the principal's conduct.
- Engineer an early win in the first six weeks, something small and visible, so the staff experiences the new principal as effective.
- Set a hard check at week six: is the intervention block actually in the schedule and actually happening? Verify with your own eyes, not a report.