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Philly.com: At high-poverty schools, lack of stability starts at the top
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L.P. Hill Elementary in Strawberry Mansion has gone through five principals in nine years.
Parent Dawn Hawkins says that has led to real turmoil at Hill, where virtually all students live below the poverty line and stable leadership is crucial.
"Changing principal to principal to principal - you can't get anything established like that," said Hawkins, whose son, Khyrie Brown, is a sixth grader at Hill. "We deserve a stable school so we can get to real learning, not starting over every few months."
Two recently released reports underscore the leadership issues faced by Hill and other high-poverty schools in Philadelphia and across the country. Namely, researchers found, schools that educate the neediest students typically have less-experienced principals, more leadership upheaval, and more instability than other schools.
In the 2011-12 school year, 35 percent of the Philadelphia School District's highest-poverty schools had new principals. In city schools with students from the highest-income backgrounds, 15 percent of schools had new principals that year.
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