So Newsweek published its "Top 100 High Schools" issue this week. Their editorial slant was about the importance of principals. I've never taught high school, but it wasn't news to me. Principals set the tone at every school, for good or ill.
If you are researching schools for your child, talk to principals - and see if you can get staff members to talk about the principals. A great staff can be driven away by a bad principal and there go the test scores.
Principals are the arbiters of discipline, tone and academic standards at a school. They hire the staff. They collect the data for No Child Left Behind. They deal with the problem students (and the problem parents). Their jobs demand brains, organization, kindness and an ability to bring out the best in people. They need to be amazing people.
The first time I got a bad feeling about my former principal was when I met the woman he hired to teach fourth grade. She was the only new hire, as the just-retired principal had made our school a happy place and no staff members had wanted to leave (uncommon in my old district) except for the one who had moved thirty miles away. Anyway, Mr. J chose Miss W.
Miss W, even though she was a brand new teacher, didn't want any help from the veteran staff or from the instructional coach. She was offended by suggestions on how to deal with her more challenging students. She struggled with the fourth grade curriculum (no, really, the math was beyond her). But she especially struggled with classroom management. She had a hard time keeping track of materials, assignments and students. When a student misbehaved, that student was sent to the (unsupervised) hallway. Despite repeated offers from the rest of the staff, she refused to send anyone to our rooms for a time-out. When she was forbidden to use her hallway method any more, she put the troublemakers in the back of the classroom. Because she didn't understand the curriculum, the group of troublemakers grew (they were all bored and frustrated). Eventually, some of them started eating chalk so that they could throw up and be sent home. And home was no picnic for them.
When Miss W was informed that her students were so unhappy that they were making themselves throw up, she stopped letting them go to the office after throwing up. She made them clean it up themselves. Now, some of the kids were very challenging kids, but not one of them was violent or hateful. They were just very, very, unhappy. When all of this came to light, the instructional coach began spending every day, all day, with Miss W. She was forced to send misbehaving kids to other classrooms (and let me say that every one of them who came to my room was well-behaved, diligent and sweet the whole time). The principal and the district bent over backwards to show Miss W how to be a teacher.
It didn't work, and she resigned at Christmas. I'm not saying that Mr.J could have foreseen just how incompetent she was, but he did choose her. By the following school year, Mr. Jones had dissolved all committees except the one required by the district and phased out many of the things that had made our students happy and successful. He began undermining staff members in front of students. He created problems between staff members and resentment between teachers and his superiors. He, and he alone, ruined that school.
So, yes Newsweek, principals are everything.
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