Education Week - December 9, 2020 - 8

What Principals Have Learned
From COVID-19's 'Stress Test'
When schools and districts shut
down abruptly in the spring, principals jumped into action.
They knocked on doors to find
students, packed meals for families,
scrambled to set up remote learning
programs, and, in some cases, even
provided money to families struggling to make ends meet.
Their experiences in those early chaotic days as the coronavirus pandemic
swept across the country, and their
preparation for the new school year,
are captured in a series of five recently
published briefs by the Consortium for
Policy Research in Education, at the
University of Pennsylvania.
The briefs, based on interviews
with 120 principals in 19 states, show
principals' raw reactions as they and
their districts struggled to make plans
amid a fog of uncertainty and the
challenges they faced. The analyses
also include takeaways for schools
and districts to prepare for the next
emergency.
The in-the-moment research revealed glaring inequities and varied district approaches. Some gave
principals broad autonomy to make
decisions related to the pandemic
response, while others took a topdown centralized approach that
constrained school leaders. Others
balanced the two approaches.

The first priority for principals during the crisis was ensuring that their
students, staff, and families were OK
before getting to academics.
" The schools with the least amount
of resources were the ones that were
most intricately involved with meeting the needs of those communities-
food hubs, going into the apartment
complex and making sure the internet hubs were there, " said Bradley
Carpenter, an associate professor of
educational leadership at Baylor University and one of the 20 researchers
who interviewed principals for the
study. " Those were the schools that
were working more hours than the
schools that were affluent. "
The briefs also highlighted another
incongruous feature of the education system: that the measures often
used to judge schools-chiefly test
scores-only capture a fragment of
what school leaders and teachers do.
" The principals are doing all these
amazing things, which are serving
urgent needs of kids and families, "
said Jonathan Supovitz, the chairman of the education policy division
at the Graduate School of Education
at the University of Pennsylvania.
" That's not taken into account in what
we think of as a good school. There is
an imbalance between our metrics
for assessing quality and the actual
role of schools in society. "
Overall, Supovitz said the coro-

navirus pandemic was like a stress
test for school systems, " much like
in 2009 when there was a financial
crisis and banks go through a stress
test to make sure they could respond
in future crises. "

Lessons for What's Ahead
The briefs examine how principals
managed the crisis; major challenges
for families and educators; how districts delivered support for principals
and students during the shutdown;
accountability; and how principals
supported their staff and students
social-emotional well-being as well
as their own.
District responses ranged from
" highly responsive to well-intentioned
but fundamentally counterproductive. " Districts that had planned for
emergencies generally had a better response to the shutdown, the researchers found. And lack of readiness put
the onus on teachers and principals to
" make do " with what they had or come
up with creative solutions.
Among the recommendations:
* Districts should set up opportunities for principals to network-something principals told researchers
helped a lot during the crisis.
* Districts should provide more training for teachers, as well as take into account that teachers and principals are
managing multiple roles-as educa-

DigitalVision Vectors/Getty

By Denisa R. Superville

Principals on Schooling
During COVID-19

tors, parents, and caregivers-while
setting up remote learning programs.
* Plan for future emergencies and
disruptions to schooling.
" The COVID-19 pandemic is a dry
run for future disruptions in education, " the researchers wrote. " This
expectation should motivate all districts to do an 'after action review' to
see what they might learn about their
response (for better and worse) to
prepare for the next curveball that life
will throw at us. "
Given that principals' duties multiplied and magnified during the
pandemic responses, the authors recommend that school leaders get additional support to handle some of the
technical challenges of the job, so that
they can focus on instruction, particularly as a number of students are expected to lose ground academically

Using Student Data to Identify Future
Criminals: A Privacy Debacle
Families were unaware of practice
By Mark Lieberman
Experts on data privacy and student security are calling for investigations and parents are expressing
alarm after a news report last week
revealed that a county police department in Florida uses sensitive
data from the local school district to
keep a secret list of middle and high
school students it deems as potential
future criminals.
The Pasco County sheriff 's office
uses academic performance and discipline data from schools, as well as
records from the state Department
of Children and Families, to identify
" at-risk youth who are destined to
a life of crime, " according to an 82page sheriff 's office intelligence document obtained by the Tampa Bay
Times. Slightly more than 400 students out of 30,000 in the district's
secondary schools are on the list, the
sheriff 's office told the Times.

Students can be placed on the list if
they get a " D " grade in a class, miss
school three times in a quarter, get
a single discipline referral during a
quarter, or have experienced childhood trauma, according to the Times
report.
The Pasco sheriff 's office has said
it uses the list as a tool for targeting
students who need additional support and mentorship.
The existence of the list was not
public knowledge until the Times
report was published Nov. 19. Students on the list and their families
have not been told that the sheriff 's
office has identified them as potential future criminals. District superintendent Kurt Browning and two
Pasco County school principals told
the Times they weren't aware the
list existed.
Browning, who in 2012 was elected
to the superintendent role and this
month won re-election to a third

8 | EDUCATION WEEK | December 9, 2020 | www.edweek.org

term, said he wasn't troubled by the
revelation.
" We have an agreement with the
Sheriff 's Office, " the superintendent said in an interview with the
Times. " The agreement requires
them to use (the data) for official
law enforcement purposes. I have
to assume that's exactly what they
are using it for. "

School District Responds
Stephen Hegarty, a spokesperson
for the Pasco County school district,
told Education Week on Nov. 20 that
he hadn't had a chance to discuss the
Times investigation at length with
the superintendent. " We'll look it
over, " he said.
Hegarty said it's too early to say
whether the district will contact families about this issue or suspend the
practice of sharing student data with
the police department. The need for
a strong relationship between police
and schools, according to Hegarty,
was highlighted by school shootings

like the one at Marjory Stoneman
Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla. in February 2018.
" We're not going to make any rash
changes in terms of our relationship
with the sheriff 's department, " he
said.
A spokesperson for the Pasco
sheriff 's department told Education
Week in a Nov. 24 email statement
that the department has no plans to
change its policies and procedures
around student data. " We stand
by this program and are proud of
our partnership with Pasco County
Schools, " the spokesperson wrote.
Both the sheriff 's department
and the school district shared with
Education Week a copy of a written agreement that requires the police officer assigned to each Pasco
County middle and high school (also
known as a " school resource officer "
or SRO) to " hold any education records in strict confidence " and " fully
comply " with federal and state data
privacy laws.
The district pays the sheriff 's office

because of the in-person shutdowns.
Researchers found from a subset
of interviews that even though states
suspended accountability measures,
that did not affect teachers' goal to
provide students with rigorous instruction or addressing the needs of
families. Instead, school staff relied
on existing relationships and grade
level and subject area professional
learning communities to hold themselves accountable.

New Ways to Engage
Principals said the pandemic forced
them to find new ways to interact and
communicate with parents. Where a
weekly newsletter might have done
the trick in the past, principals found
that rapidly changing information
required faster responses. They also

$2.3 million a year for law enforcement services in schools, according
to the Times.
Experts on student data privacy
believe the existence of the list may
represent an illegal use of student
data. Regardless of legality, they say,
the list puts students and families at
risk of being unfairly targeted before
they've done anything wrong.
The risk could be particularly
harmful for students of color, who
are already subject to disproportionate scrutiny from police nationwide.
In the wake of nationwide protests
for racial justice this summer, several
school districts severed ties with police departments, while others considered removing school resource
officers but decided against it.
" What's happened here is they've
got an apparently improper use
of FERPA data, " said Pam Dixon,
founder and executive director of
the World Privacy Forum. " This is a
lot more problematic than the school
district is apparently understanding. "
Deb Herbage, who has a daughter
in 10th grade at a Pasco County high
school, told Education Week she felt
" mortified " when she first read the
Tampa Bay Times article.
She's not concerned that her
daughter, a straight-A student in Advanced Placement classes, is on the

Education Week - December 9, 2020

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