Mark Federman: Catch Students Before They Fall

In Principal’s Office, a regular feature of SchoolBook, a city school principal is interviewed for insights into school management and the life of a school leader. What do you think makes a good principal? Join the conversation below.

Mark Federman has been at East Side Community High School, a 6-12 public school on East 12th Street, for 17 years. He started there as a teacher, and by age 29 was asked to be principal.

The school has 590 students, many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds. Yet somehow the school thrives. As Inside Schools wrote after visiting the school last September, "East Side Community High School is a rarity in New York City: a very good school that serves some of the city's most disadvantaged students. Most kids enter the school performing well below grade level, but, thanks to strong leadership, individual attention, and a group of committed teachers, some 90% of graduates attend college." That individual attention is achieved through small classes and an advisory system.

Mr. Federman's words pour out in a rapid clip, and he does not like sitting in his office. Instead, he is out in the hallways, where he greets every student by name. This interview was edited and condensed.

You have been the principal of this school 11 years now. That's becoming a rarity in this profession, where principals, and teachers, come and go more quickly. Why do you think there is such a turnover?

It’s been scary for me to see how principals are spending just two or three or even just seven years at a job, and then going on to something else. It saddens me. I think it’s something that we need to look at as a system.

With all the reform movement, with everything that we're doing, there is a lot of smart stuff out there, a lot of stuff that’s controversial, but at the end of the day we need to figure out ways to keep leaders at a school for a long time and allow them to feel like this can be a career. I worry for this profession in New York City. They're creating more schools, and you have less experienced principals.

What are some of those pressures?

I think the system is so big and the combination of demands on a school leader are so much. This job has so many facets to it. The principals who are able to at the end of the day focus primarily on their school and on supporting their teachers, supporting their kids and their parents and really work with their schools -- those are the ones among us who can survive.

But the pressures from outside, while well intentioned -- every minute there's another e-mail and another request for information. There are so many people trying to fix the system at the same time and so many pressures from the outside. All the budget cuts cause an extra headache and exponentially make the job that much harder. It just takes so much to stay afloat, and after a while people are just so exhausted by all the demands.

Why have you stayed this long?

This is the most cheesy, cliché thing in the world, but I literally love work. The day sometimes goes by way too quick. It's completely stressful and it never ends and you wake up in the middle of the night and it’s always on your mind, but I love this place, I love the kids, I love the teachers, I love the school, I love the families, and I care a lot and I like coming to work. It’s exciting. It’s energizing; it’s inspirational. Maybe if you wake up for a couple of weeks or a couple of months and that’s not happening, that's when it's time to go.

How do you measure success? Are you only as good as your last progress report?

For me it's a combination of qualitative and quantitative data.
Certainly progress reports matter and that's important to us. I look at it as, O.K., we get an 'A' every year, but there's more we can do. But for us, it's seeing kids go to college and being successful in college, that's the end result.

Having a 6-12 grade school, seeing what can happen to kids, seeing how teachers really matter, seeing how schools really matter. I have enough of a sense that what we're doing really works.

But it's also every little moment during the day where you see kids feeling good about things, teachers feeling good about things, getting good feedback from people that we serve, and the combination of seeing students becoming better writers, better readers, seeing students get knocked down by something and then seeing them get back up. Seeing my teachers continuing to get accolades or get accepted for opportunities.

All of those things add to my feeling of success. If our progress reports and official data were yucky, it would be harder to feel good about those other victories, but I know they're very connected.

A lot of teachers and principals say middle school is the toughest age to teach, and even the chancellor acknowledges that's a level that needs work in New York City schools. Why do you think it's such a hard age to educate?

If you ask any adult where they don’t want to go back to in life, 95 percent of adults will say, 'Don’t send me back to middle school.' It was one of the hardest, most awkward times. But the idea that we've seen kids over the years who entered at age 10 and 11 and then go through high school, we can say to parents and to them, 'It’s going to be O.K.' In this school, the middle school teachers get to see the kids go on to high school. You get to see how they turn out.

How do you organize this school?

It's done by floor and sections. Each grade has its own section; they take classes with their own grade. But we've built into the schedule a lot of time for teachers to talk about what we’re doing 6 through 12, to make sure that if you're a ninth-grade teacher you're not just given some random kid. You know what the kids have done. You’ve thought about it. It’s part of a bigger plan.

But having a 6-12th grade school is interesting. One minute you have a little kid crying because they literally miss their mom, and then you have an 18- or 19-year-old with different problems. We have every possible teenage problem, but also every possible teenage joy.

You share your building with a charter school, and many more schools are facing this. Do you feel threatened by charter schools?

No. I’m not one of these progressive school principals who’s against charter schools. I understand the arguments and concerns about charter schools. But if you’re a parent you should be able to send your child anywhere you want to send your child.

If a charter school provides more opportunities and children are learning and they're successful there, then I'm all for it. If they don't or if they exclude, I'm not for that. I’m for anything that works for kids. I’m not just stuck on stupid.

Your school has a good track record with working with Latino and African-American youths. What are you doing that works?

We’re not done with that. We’re still struggling with that. But it’s a combination of what we’re doing in the classroom with small-class learning, hands-on learning, and definitely just that we’re paying more attention.

Each kid here has an adviser. Every adult has 14 kids they’re in charge of, so that way the kids don’t get lost. The adviser monitors their progress; they talk to their families regularly. They make plans for the kids, they match them up with extracurricular activities, they give them the support that they need.

It’s also about respecting kids. I talk a lot about loving kids. A lot of the issues with African-American and Latino boys is that they’re walking around in a city that treats them as if -- I mean they walk into a store and everybody’s watching them and waiting for them to do something bad. We try to catch them doing good.

We have kids who act like knuckleheads, and we have moments where we have to be tough with them. But we’re looking for kids to do the right thing. We have a lot of faith that they can do the right thing.

What do you think of the teacher evaluation system?

I believe in feedback. We’re getting paid by the city to serve, and good teaching matters; good teaching is the most important thing. But it should be done in a way that supports teacher growth. It has to be with a combination of training, development and honoring teachers' work. Anybody who knows anything about teachers knows that the best of them want to learn and want to be better. But teachers are not interchangeable.

What has been your proudest moment this school year so far?

We had a day back in January when our kids came back from their first semester of college to visit. To see the freshmen and sophomore college students talking to our kids in middle school and high school, that was big. It was a combination of seeing how invested our graduates were in the well-being of our young kids, and how proud they were of how they made it, and watching our kids looking at them like they were some sort of superheroes and then watching the teachers watching the kids, and then me watching the whole thing.

It's like everything you work for, it's those moments -- that's big-scale, ultimate-goal proud.