Dr. Carol Burris to retire as SSHS principal

Plans to devote full time to fighting Common Core, APPR

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Dr. Carol Burris, the nationally recognized and award-winning principal of South Side High School for 15 years, announced last week that she would retire early in order to focus on opposing the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the state’s teacher evaluation system, the Annual Professional Performance Review.

Burris, 62, has been principal of SSHS since 2000. She previously served as assistant principal, a position for which she left the Lawrence School District in 1997. In 2010 she was named New York state’s Outstanding Educator by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and three years later the School Administrators Association of New York and the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the High School Principal of the Year. This year she was honored as a Nassau BOCES Education Partner.

Burris has been a vocal opponent of both the Common Core testing and the teacher evaluations, known as APPR, criticizing them in columns in The Washington Post and other publications.

She announced on April 13 that she would retire on June 30.

“I think that a lot of the changes that I see happening in schools right now — especially the evaluation of teachers by test scores — they’re changes I’m not personally comfortable with,” Burris told the Herald. “In the former APPR system, much was left to district discretion. And we were able to not place teachers in the position where they had to worry about the test scores that students received.

“But with this new bill, that’s all changing,” she added, referring to legislation that accompanied passage of the state budget, which will make the state tests count for more of a teacher’s evaluation. “And I think it’s time for me to step outside of the system and advocate for schools full time.”

She also said she is looking forward to spending more time with her family. “Both of those factors combined made me make what really was the most difficult decision of my life,” Burris said. “Coming to South Side was the easiest decision I ever had to make. Leaving South Side was the hardest.”

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