Teachers are so important to individual students, but there are no great schools without great principals. Any principal can talk a good game at central office or during a PTO (Parent Teacher Organization) meeting, but it’s really hard to fake a thriving school culture when your kids don’t know you and your staff don’t trust you. Transformative school leaders are about the closest thing we have to a magic bullet in education, and it’s amazing how often we lose sight of this as school reform debates devolve into battles over school governance, accountability measures and curricula reforms. I was reminded of this when I read an excellent commentary in the New York Times called, “
Want to Fix Schools? Go to the Principal’s Office.” In short:
The story actually focused on Chicago, a place where principals get a lot of attention and are rightly seen as the linchpin of school improvement, in large part because of the groundbreaking research at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research. The Consortium developed a school survey that proved predictive about a school’s chances of improving academically, based on student and teacher perceptions of trust, safety, leadership and challenging classwork. Chicago principals who wanted to get better at their jobs used this data to map a new path, and many of them made common sense changes that moved the needle in remarkable ways. Those tools are now available to all school districts nationwide, including all districts in Illinois. Some school districts have resisted the survey and the scrutiny, in part because principals in many high-scoring suburbs aren’t accustomed to so much self-reflection and accountability. Chicago Public Schools gets a lot of grief for its financial and bureaucratic dysfunction, and rightly so. But they are doing a lot right when it comes to principal leadership, which the New York Times was wise to highlight. I hope principals in those less scrutinized districts are paying attention.Virtually every public school in the country has someone in charge who’s called the principal. Yet principals have a strangely low profile in the passionate debates about education. The focus instead falls on just about everything else: curriculum (Common Core and standardized tests), school types (traditional versus charter versus private) and teachers (how to mold and keep good ones, how to get rid of bad ones). You hear far more talk about holding teachers accountable than about principals.
But principals can make a real difference. Overlooking them is a mistake — and fortunately, they’re starting to get more attention. The federal education law passed in 2015, to replace No Child Left Behind, puts a new emphasis on the development of principals. So have some innovative cities and states, including Denver, New Orleans and Massachusetts.
