One day, the phone rang, and I discovered that I was the new principal of a Pre-K through eighth-grade school. I thought of all the fantastic and amazing things that were going to happen while I was the principal. My dreams and hopes for the students, staff, and families outweighed the realities that laid in waiting.
In reality, all principals have a difficult and challenging job. It is a hour gig. There is no downtime, either physically or emotionally.
Whether a principal is in an urban, suburban, or rural district, the job is tough. The never-ending demands are based on demographics, socio-economics, politics, and more. Soon, the weight becomes too heavy, and a decision must be made. Should I stay or go? Statistics show many decide to leave. A national survey of public school principals found that, overall, approximately 18 percent of principals had left their position since the year before.
In high-poverty schools, the turnover rate was 21 percent. When I became a principal, I had no idea that I would become a part of the turnover statistics. As a principal, I can genuinely say that I was not prepared for all of the social-emotional issues of my students.
Educators train to teach not to be psychologists or social workers. However, I had to adapt and learn quickly. Despite adapting, the weight of dealing with social ills that enter into the school classrooms becomes too much to handle at times. Eventually, I began to suffer from secondary trauma and a few health issues. I always joke that I did not have gray hair until I became a principal.
Whether a school is in a rural, urban, or suburban area, issues of violence, drugs, homelessness, joblessness, and mental health issues make teaching and learning more difficult. When my teachers and students were stressed, I had stress also. I wanted to alleviate the difficulties or problems that they experienced. Sometimes, it was possible to make their lives easier, but often that was not the case.
It is a harsh reality, but I could not fix everything nor save them all. A second reason principals leave is the lack of funding and resources. Unfortunately, many schools do not receive adequate funding from local, state, and federal government agencies.
I was a principal for seven years. I had to close teaching and aide positions, including shutting down the school library. The loss of funds caused major damage to our growth, personnel numbers, and programming.
When funding is minimal, a principal cannot purchase sufficient amounts of materials, technology hardware, or software or provide extracurricular activities. Yet, the expectations of raising test scores remained despite not being able to give the students necessary programs and resources. I felt like I was continually robbing Peter to pay Paul. Teachers and I scraped to make ends meet and persistently looked for grants and other means of funding.
Occasionally a few helpful colleagues shared or donated used materials or resources. Next, I did not expect the amount of politics and pressure from outside sources. Some days I felt like there were too many demands to answer. Pressure came from the district, politicians, and micromanagers.
Central office administrators wanted to see data every quarter for attendance, on-track grades, behavior, and suspension numbers. Then, the same people wanted to make unannounced or announced visits to complete walk-throughs and observations. Next, they tried to unpack the data and tell all the negative things they observed.
Unfortunately, the central office administrators hardly ever said anything positive. The staff, students, parents and I worked hard and deserved some praise about the academic gains our students made. I learned that you could not please everyone or hardly anyone.
My school building served as the hub of the community, so many neighborhood agencies wanted to be partners. Some offered after school tutoring, sports programs, chess teams, etc. Eventually, politics won, and I was pushed out and left the job. The fourth reason is surely something relatable to many principals. My responsibilities as a school principal were many. I always looked at the job of being the CEO of the school. First and foremost, I was an instructional leader.
I hired teachers, aides, and other staff members. It was my responsibility to follow all directives and policies, balance the budget, implement new programs, and handle day-to-day operations.
Do not forget that I met with parents, students, staff members, community members, and vendors. Even the most energetic and tenacious school leaders need tact and good people skills to retain and inspire staff. Related: How an unconventional principal used blended learning to help turn around a struggling urban school.
Still, the relationship between principal and teacher is often a complicated one. Throughout the autumn, Hardy set a grueling pace. Her weekdays started at 6 a. That becomes a professional objective like any other. Researchers say that, next to teachers, principals are the most important factor in improving student achievement.
But effective school leaders also need time — usually about five years — to build trust with faculty and parents, set a vision for improvement, and hire the right people. The majority of principals who head schools that serve low-income students leave before they can make lasting changes. The ones who remain in the profession often move to schools that serve more affluent students whose needs are less overwhelming. The departure of a principal, in turn, often sets off an exodus of teachers.
School culture can also be disrupted, and parent engagement wavers. Looking broadly at the effect of principal turnover on student learning, a researcher from Mount Holyoke College studied 12 years of data from North Carolina public schools. They found that when principals leave, student achievement generally declines for two years. Kleban, who served as both a teacher and a principal in his 20s before becoming a charter management CEO, knows the importance of stability in the front office.
Related: Challenged by charters, private and parochial school enrollments fall. Shortly after Thanksgiving, Kleban decided to shut down email service for his teachers and administrators after 7 p. Yet it is not just long hours and an avalanche of emails that drive principals from their jobs. Researchers say that isolation and a lack of professional support pose enduring problems as well.
Throughout the semester, Hardy had participated in a long-distance school leadership program through a teachers college in New York City. By Christmas, she began to apply some of what she was learning to her work at Sylvanie Williams and fashion a more personal approach to school. I think she wanted that for her school. Although Hardy was still dipping in and out of classrooms, she let her teacher-coaches work with teachers directly. Sometimes, she let others lead the meetings.
Hardy got her staff to encourage students to join after-school programs. She established intramural sports teams, a cheerleading squad, and a drum line to complement the academic tutoring the school was offering. One evening, Hardy gathered her instructional team together, not to review a video on best practices for classroom management, but to play laser tag and eat Buffalo wings. Yes, she still wrote the newsletter on Sunday afternoon, but she might send a friendly text to a staff member as well.
She began to make time for her personal life: She even set a date for her wedding and recently got married. In the spring, she took a group of top students to Selma, Alabama to commemorate the civil rights march of from Montgomery to Selma. In the aftermath of the news about the police shootings of young black men, she urged her teachers to discuss law enforcement and racial issues in class. But more needed to be done. Behavioral infractions, which had soared the year before she arrived, continued to drop.
But the number of students who were chronically absent from school rose from 31 percent to 37 percent. When the state test scores measuring achievement in social studies and science were released, the results were disappointing. Although the youngest students showed improvement, less than half the students were, on average, at grade level in those subjects. On the interim tests, student achievement was inching up. But more than half of third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders were still not reading at grade level.
Related: Billboards and celebrities: How charters vie for students in hyper competitive New Orleans. The school experienced considerable turnover as well. Five of the 14 teachers who taught kindergarten through fifth-grade classes left. When the front doors of Sylvanie Williams opened up again this past August, the routines that administrator put in place to restore order the previous year were in full force.
Children were chided for touching their hair. They were encouraged not to let their eyes roam, not to talk in the hallway, and to line up on a taped line in their classrooms. Yet another administrator had joined Brown to deal with disciplinary infractions. While her teacher-leaders do many of the classroom evaluations, Hardy herself again began visiting the classrooms of some of the least experienced teachers.
She sent them content resources and offered management pointers. School leadership is not easy, and many of those who take the position have not necessarily had the professional learning and development to be successful. They are often handed the keys to the building, after they successfully interviewed for the position, and then left to their own devices. The interview was the easy part. Some of those new leaders are able to meet the challenge of leadership because they are provided with the support from their district, but in other cases, new leaders feel as though they have to fake it until they make it.
In fact, 42 percent of principals surveyed indicated they were considering leaving their position NASSP. Among the most common reasons they cite are:. Leithwood et al found that principals are second to teachers when it comes to impacting student learning, so we need to be concerned that the challenges of leading through most of the above issues takes school leaders away from focusing on instructional leadership, which helps those leaders impact student learning.
Even for those who do not leave the position in the first five years, the longer those school building leaders spend in their position being taken away from the important work of focusing on learning, the harder it will be for them to engage back in instructional leadership. It is no wonder that we continue to see school building leaders who struggle with a balance between management and instructional leadership. For too long, leaders felt more comfortable with the management side of the position because it was taking up so much time, and instructional leadership took a backseat.
However, what we know is that there needs to be some movement back toward instructional leadership if learning walks and formal observations are ever going to be impactful. That takes professional learning and development. First and foremost, there is a difference between high-quality professional learning and development and that of gimmicks. Plus, money is tight and so is the time leaders have to dedicate to professional learning in the first place.
If leaders are to stay in their positions and have a positive impact on student learning, then they need professional learning and development that will help them focus on some of the following topics:.
School building leaders need to know not only when to engage in these conversations to help their staff and students but also to understand how to engage in these conversations to help themselves as well. It also means they understand that they need to have these conversations when they have the greatest proximity to all staff so they can all focus on learning and not just on discipline or union issues in their buildings. Leadership coaching is beginning to take steam after years of instructional coaching being a way to provide professional learning and development with teachers.
In fact, I wrote this blog post on leadership coaching five years ago. Principals often report that having a mentor or coach is the most valuable learning opportunity for them. Leadership coaching can help enhance the context beliefs of individuals and teams because through the experience the individuals and teams can see that their voice matters, their district or division cares about their success, and they develop a deeper impact on learning.
Part of the issue is that of ego and vulnerability. So many school leaders are used to being the one in charge and looked to as being the all-knowing educator in the building that coaching creates a perception that those leaders who choose to do it are not as capable as others, when nothing could be further from the truth.
However, there is another way to look at leadership coaching, and that is when a school district promotes experienced leaders to become leadership coaches in their district. Or when a school principal uses coaching to help their assistant principals, teacher leaders, and instructional coaches understand how to practice instructional leadership. In the End What we know is that we have an issue.
Forty-two percent of leaders want to leave their positions, and turnover is not going to help our school systems develop a stronger focus on learning. Turnover is going to chip away at the very foundation of our schools.
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