By Paul Bonner
Not too long ago, I walked up to a register in a grocery store. The clerk noticed that I had a school district ID and asked, “Are you a teacher?” I replied, “I’m a principal.” She looked at me, smiled, and said sincerely, “I never knew what my principal did.”
The school principal represents a cog in a wheel that is often anonymous. The spokes for a school, students, staff, district, state, and parents, can present divergent agendas. A principal confronts a series of competing expectations from the school community, such as loyalty vs. initiative, people skills vs. authority, compliance vs. risk-taking, and servant vs. taskmaster. Ironically, a principal can be seen as the face of a particular school by the parents, community, and district. A principal has to be part politician, mediator, conciliator, and instructional savant.
A successful school has a positive culture that is led by a principal who is visible and approachable. If agendas around discipline, district policy, or operations become the priority for specific entities and the principal is seen as aloof or impersonal, opportunities for solutions, no matter the endeavor, decrease. Few principals can navigate the challenges in school leadership without trusting support from a district and school community that focuses on a collective vision toward student learning.
Perhaps the most profound challenge to a principal is the conflict between the current application of performance data and intuitive experience. Testing mandates that de-emphasize environmental factors such as family dynamics, personal struggles of students, or poverty can mean that the principal has to convince parents and students that mandated global instructional remedies work for everyone. This can challenge the personal integrity of the principal while he or she addresses the school community with justifications for strategies that often do not work in a specific school’s context. The principal’s directives to the school in this regard can sow distrust, while results can have career implications.
The contemporary conditions for the public school principal have profound implications for schooling. According to the Learning Policy Institute, “The national average tenure of principals in their schools was four years as of 2016–17. This number masks considerable variation, with 35 percent of principals being at their school for less than two years…” The Learning Policy Institute goes on to say that “…The root of the problem… may be the school characteristics—such as low levels of resources, less competitive salaries, and problematic working conditions—that are often concurrent with student disadvantage.” The time a principal serves can impact institutional continuity that hinders teacher effectiveness and community confidence.
Giving principals the autonomy to implement practices that address challenges presented in the schoolhouse while providing resources required for success is critical to reverse the trends in principal attrition. The crisis in the principalship comes from a failure of the educational establishment to address the factors of professional isolation often creates an institutional climate of distrust that wears a principal down. Principals have to be supported to exhibit confident leadership that is necessary for a schoolhouse to thrive.
Paul Bonner is a former principal with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina and the Huntsville City Schools in Alabama.
Some of what you describe is common to all middle managers — balancing the needs and realities of front-line workers with those of customers/clients and higher management.
In education, higher management means the superintendent, district staff, the school board, the state department of education, the federal department of education and others (accrediting agency, state athletic association).
This is the problem that exists in the Principalship. It is a position that is carrying out district policy, but is seen as the focus by the school community actually being served. Although schools have similarities, they are unique organisms. Principals have to have the autonomy to respond to the unique characteristics of a school and student need. Districts need to provide resources that respond to the needs identified by principals and teachers. Simply seeing a principal as a middle manager denies that principal an opportunity to use local knowledge and experience as the basis for school service. Principals nor teachers are seen as experts able to promote solutions that best serve their students. This needs to change.
Believe you missed my first word — some.
I agree. Both teacher and principal roles are pulled in many different directions yet are the most responsible for the students. All the others are outsiders really. The further away from the school the less responsibility.
So it is definitely problematic when the outsiders don’t include those responsible for the students in the decision-making.
That’s different than middle management in a business and one of the reasons I don’t like the term customer as noted in a previous post.
What a load of rubbish. If schooling was a business the British education is bankrupt. 40 kids start school and 25 drop out at sixteen. Fifteen stay on and only 5 go stop University.. These are glaring failure rates. Passing examinations does not make one a teacher. That is why in England we have Private schools. Teachers should excite the pupils to near demand to lean more. Where is the excitement? You are a failed profession! Worth repeating!
Yikes!
For the record, I know many teachers who do a great job with few resources. So could you be a bit more specific about your anger? Are you an educator? I think we agree about schools not being a business, but your comment about a failed profession is what is confusing.
I don’t understand the anger or the context. I would say the failure in the United States is the unwillingness to fund teacher preparation and support. If you look at Singapore and Finland, among others, their success rate is off of the charts because the focus is on providing time needed for teacher planning, preparation and growth. Too often in the United States, we simply have teachers work in the classroom for 7 hours with no allotment for preparation. We also fail to allow teachers to mature under veteran tutelage (Another practice common in other countries). In the US, Private schools with very high annual costs are very successful because they spare no expense. If the same were true in public schools you would see dramatically better results. It isn’t the profession that is the failure because most succeed, it is the lack of support.
Thanks for your reply, Paul. Private schools also don’t take every student. Schools in the UK are named differently than here in the U.S. Not sure if private school means public school. Or if all students can attend them.
Hide behind your censorship. This will be posted to my thousands of downlines
No one is hiding anything. You have to give the site a minute to check the comment.