Member-only story
High School Principal Reform Now!
Fixing the hardest job in schools
Our Principal is leaving. On the last Monday of the year, she called us together for a quick stand-up faculty meeting, where she told us that next year was the year when she “would be graduating, too.” It will be her fourth year.
The guy before her did two.
The guy before him did a few more than four, but even so, when I think back on all the Principals that I have worked with over my 20 years (6), it occurs to me that the job of Principal is the hardest job in any school. And the job of High School Principal is the hardest job in any school system. It’s harder than superintendent/CEO. At least in American schools, more than any other position in the system, the High School Principal is the most public and thankless role in the organization.
Which led me to thinking that there might be a different way here. Rather than changing who is in that role, what if we changed the role itself?
Why is it Principal?
I don’t have enough of a handle on the history of modern schooling to understand what has gone into making the job of Principal a singular one. But I can’t imagine it’s anything all that significant outside of Prussian/Taylorist artifacts of organizational structure. I suspect that most…
