Principals take note. There is a bull’s eye on your back!

The policy wonks new mantra is “We’ve got to do something. We must improve schools.” So, what do we do? Let’s find a convenient target of opportunity and strike. Then, at least we can say we did something. So, what is the easiest target? Not the teachers. There are too many teachers, and besides, everyone likes teachers. Let’s replace the principal. After all, when things aren’t going well at a school, the principal should be held responsible. For more than a decade, the school’s report card has been the principal’s report card. As one of my mentors told me years ago, “You (the principal) can delegate responsibility, but never accountability.

For someone to believe that the current school reform models are viable ways to improve schools, they would have to believe that the principal acts autonomously, independent of the school district. In fact, this could not be farther from the truth.

Take for instance the situation in Columbus, Ohio. For the first week of school, student transportation was a nightmare. Buses, when they did arrive, were as much as one to two hours late. The author, writing on the Flypaper blog, thought that was “appalling.” “In six days of school, only four of the buses that service CCA (Columbus Collegiate Academy) have been on time. School starts at 7:50 a.m., and First Student buses have dropped kids off as many as two hours late. You can imagine the impact this has on lost instructional time (not to mention the level of frustration experienced by parents, some of whom are new to the school).”

Guess who took the brunt of the teacher, parent, and student frustration--the principal, of course.

I learned very early as a principal that, as far as the students, parents, and teachers were concerned, I, the principal, was the school system. When the system doesn’t work, it is the principal who hears about it. When the buses were late, the lunches were cold, the books weren’t delivered, or when the AC didn’t work, it was the principal’s fault and responsibility to correct it.

I have better example than the Columbus bus fiasco. Six days is nothing. Try six weeks. A while back as the new principal, the district hit me with, what I refer to today as the “trifecta”—a three-part disaster. Yes, this was a set up, but it wasn’t intentional. At least, most of it wasn’t.

I was the new principal at the school in which the former principal had served for the last twenty-two years. I wanted to get off to a good start and make a good impression. Anyone who has ever worked in a school knows that everything is a team effort including transportation, food services, human resources, and facilities. If one part of the team drops the ball, the school suffers and the principal looks bad. If the school does well, it is because it has great teachers. If the school does poorly, it is because the principal is not getting the job done.

Trifecta: Part 1: Transportation

For the first six weeks of school, all buses were forty-five minutes to one hour late every day. Irate parents tied up the phone lines every morning. The police were upset because they couldn’t plan for traffic control. Teachers didn’t know when the buses arrived, so they had no idea when to start classes. Most days, we were getting ready to serve lunch before the students had even arrived. I spent the entire day apologizing publicly and complaining privately. I have never felt so helpless.

Trifecta: Part 2: Scheduling

Before I arrived in mid-July, I was assured by district staff that the master schedule would be completed. Well, it was completed except that 20% of the students had incomplete schedules. It seems that someone in central office had the bright idea to experiment with the schedule by placing another variable in the equation--all students would be grouped in clusters in which they would have the same core teachers. This resulted in numerous conflicts. However, instead of taking out the variable and running the schedule again, they decided to close it out and require the school to hand schedule 20% of the students. Anyone who has ever worked on a high school master schedule knows that this would amount to requiring the school to hand schedule all 2,600 students.

Trifecta: Part 3: Personnel

A district official warned me in advance on more than one occasion, that I would most likely have a certain individual sabotage the opening, and sure enough, it happened. While I am not going to go into detail here, suffice it to say that a lot of things went wrong like the box of welcome to school letters later found in a closet. In addition, the letter for the antique school marquee mysteriously disappeared. You get the drift. Instead of taking care of the problem that they knew for certain would occur, the central office let it happen.

Sometimes you can look back on situations like this and laugh. I regret that, to this day, I get sick to the stomach just thinking about the stress and tension I was under. I cannot imagine what would have happened if I were new to the principalship and had no reputation to fall back on.

Reality Check

Here is a notice to all of the education experts who have never worked in a school, and whose only experience is that of having been a student. Principals don’t function autonomously. I had no control over the buses, personnel decisions, or the student scheduling process that year. As a new principal to that school, forces that were beyond my control seriously undermined my efforts. How could I make a case for high expectations and bell-to-bell instruction, when the buses were late every day?

Principals don’t make policy. They carry out policy. Principals depend on their districts to provide the resources and support they need.

Principals should be held accountable, but so should the school districts. Before principals are replaced under the new federal requirements, school districts should be required to supply proof that they provided resources and support to the principal and the school. Give principals the autonomy to hire teachers and administrators. Give them control over their budget. Then hold them accountable.

If individual teachers are to be held accountable for student test scores, the students should be held accountable. In too many states, students are “christmas-treeing” tests because they are not accountable for their performance.

In a functional system, everyone in the system is accountable and everyone takes ownership of the outcomes. Only a dysfunctional system would single out certain, specific individuals for accountability purposes.

The reality is that principals have no tenure. They serve at the pleasure of the superintendent and the school board. Principals can and frequently are replaced on a whim. Just as in professional sports, it is much easier to replace the coach than all the players.

The problem isn’t that we need to get rid of principals. The problem is that we need to hold on to them. Principal turnover, particularly in under-resourced, high-poverty schools is astronomical. Working in an under-resourced school demands a high level of “moral purpose”, but in today’s slash-and-burn climate it is a career-killer. Principals are leaving under-resourced schools, there very schools where they are needed the most, in droves because their pleas for help and resources fall on deaf ears.

Instead of scapegoating principals, we need to train them and we need to give them the resources, equipment, and support they need to do their jobs. Then and only then can we rightfully hold them accountable.