The 21st-Century Principal: Current Issues in Leadership and Policy Introduction by Milli Pierce, Harvard Principals' Center

“There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.”—Stephen Lundin, business coach and author

The essays in this volume examine the future of public schooling in the United States—and what it will mean to be a leader in public schools—by focusing on the issues that are most likely to have an impact on American society within the next 20 years. Like so many other things, public schooling is deeply affected by context. As the context of schooling changes, principals will need to refocus their work so that schools can change in accordance with the populations they serve.

Some of the most dramatic changes in the context of schooling are demographic. As Harold Hodgkinson reminds us in chapter three, “The Challenge of a Changing Nation,” senior citizens are a burgeoning population. Soon there will be many states whose demographics resemble the current population of Florida. Senior citizens are living longer, healthier, and more active lives. Hodgkinson notes that by the year 2025, at least 20 percent of the citizens in more than 27 states will be over the age of 65. Public school advocates might well be concerned about the fact that the children of these older citizens are having fewer children, which means fewer senior citizens will be grandparents. Why would seniors who have no grandchildren and who are concerned about their own health benefits, Social Security, and pensions be inclined to support public schools, particularly if those schools have reputations for being ineffective? What will this changing demographic mean for public education? Principals need to consider these kinds of questions as they look ahead.

We live in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, yet the number of poor children is increasing. At least 20 percent of the children in this country under the age of 18 are living in poverty, and that number is on the rise. We are becoming a country divided more by class than by race, as the have-nots outnumber the haves. Children from these poorest families live in all kinds of places, including some you might not expect. For example, the largest pockets of poverty are in rural America. In Oklahoma, 32 percent of children live in poverty, as do 16 percent of Vermont’s children. Large pockets of children both in cities and in rural areas hidden from public view live in poverty. What will this mean for public education?

Being a principal means being part of the decisionmaking process about how to handle the big challenges ahead of us. How will we educate every child to a high standard? How will we convince senior citizens to vote their own interests and the children’s interests as well? Whose job will it be to convince them to do that?

THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE PRINCIPAL

In the coming decades, principals will need to take on an ever larger role in the work of convincing the public to support public schools. Teacher unions will also have to play a substantive role in convincing the public of our schools’ value and importance. Failure to do so may put them out of business.

It is clear that traditional public schools will either respond to the children and communities they serve, or they will be replaced by charter schools, parochial schools, and private academies. Support for these alternatives will probably take the form of vouchers, and possibly tax credits. If we cannot make schools responsive to the children who need them and to the citizens who provide tax revenues, we may indeed lose our right to public education.

Public education is intended for all children, but some policy analysts predict that if public schools fail to improve dramatically, the only students served there will be those who have nowhere else to go. Everyone else is going to pull out and put their children in independent schools. We must work to guarantee that all children have the chance to achieve to a high standard. We already have plenty of evidence to suggest that if children are failing to meet state standards, parents will take them elsewhere. Furthermore, as fewer people are choosing to have children, we cannot expect their concerns to mirror ours. What will become of public education if we cannot provide a reason for its existence to all taxpayers, not just those with children? They will insist on putting their tax dollars where they think they will make the most difference.

One of the questions we should be asking ourselves is, do we care enough to improve our schools? If we do care, how will we get the work done? One way to ensure success is to hold principals accountable, to have them hire and give them the right to fire. In most of the worst schools, principals are sent teachers without the benefit of refusal, and this must change. The primary focus of any reform effort should be on the quality of instruction. That is the bottom line. There is no more time for excuses.

INSISTING ON QUALITY

What does quality instruction look like? We want to create lifelong learners. We want knowledgeable and caring teachers. We must attend to all different kinds of students and be prepared to address individual needs. We should teach values and model what it means to be moral human beings. We should teach children how to learn and how to access information. We should teach the arts to children and help them learn to cooperate with one another. We should teach and demonstrate good citizenship. We should provide safe places for students and teachers to take risks. We want children involved in the planning of their learning, and parents must be more involved as well. Schools can be places where community interests can be woven together, where the fabric of a community can be made stronger. We want a place that prepares students to be productive citizens with a wide range of talents and skills.

If we want parents to be an integral part of the school community, we must make them feel comfortable there. The notion of expanding the idea of schools to be community centers takes on greater importance as we welcome greater numbers of immigrants. The missions of the community and of schools become intertwined.

We also need to have leaders with foresight who can plan five to ten years out. How will we support schools and attract the best people to work in them? There are no teachers, beginning or senior, who earn what a beginning attorney in a medium-sized firm earns in Boston. These young people fresh out of law school are earning $150,000 a year, compared to a beginning teacher who earns around $30,000 a year. If the world tells us that teaching is important, then we must behave as if it were important by rewarding those who do the work well.

We need excellence and equity. We need collaboration and cooperation. We need a structure in education that can attract excellence. We need a greater connection between social policy and educational policy. How do we connect social policy or policymaking to what’s actually happening in the schools? Why do principals and teachers feel left out of policymaking?

We should all be concerned about educating our children. Policy analysts must realize that their concerns are not different from those of educators. Major education policy must be enacted only after hearing the voices of those entrusted with doing the work. How will we recruit new teachers and principals if aspirants believe they will be left out of the decision-making process for their own workplace?

THE FUTURE OF THE PRINCIPAL’S PROFESSION

Forty percent of our principals will retire in the next three years. How will we rebuild this work force? Will current principals and teachers be advocates for this work? It takes a concurrent effort on the part of teachers and principals to attract the best people to the profession. Everybody who believes schools are worth having and saving must work together to enlist the next generation of teachers and principal leaders to make this work force strong and viable.

We’re asking our 21st-century principals to do more and more, and the job is becoming one that few people want. You only have to look at the statistics across the United States. As principals are retiring, people are not standing at school employment offices saying, “Please take me! I want to be a principal.” There’s a reason for that. The job is becoming more difficult, the hours are getting longer, and we cannot expect people to sacrifice their personal lives so that they can spend as many as 80 hours a week in school. The high-end pay for a principal is about $90,000. You do the math.

For principals to remain in this work they will need to be skilled at creating strong, committed teams. This means that they need to be strong instructional leaders and need to develop teacher leaders who can help them run the school. These teachers will help manage the school, handle the budget, keep the buses running on time. If principals are expected to do it all we can be assured of mediocre performance, not because they aren’t capable but because we have asked them to be superhuman, because we do not provide the professional development time they need to learn new skills. Many principals also serve without assistance. A principal in a school of 2,000 might have an assistant principal, but in a school of 600, chances are the principal is running the school alone. Under these conditions, should we be surprised that, when forced to choose a role, many principals say the manager wins out over the instructional leader?

SCHOOL: A PLACE OF HOPES AND DREAMS

I would argue that the mission of a school is framed around hopes and dreams. Once we start extinguishing these with policies, restrictions, and a lack of resources, then we’re really denying kids their dreams.

This year’s kindergartners will be with us for the next 13 years. If we go back 13 years and look at the world then—when we were fumbling around with CDs that were just coming out, when we were still talking about a divided Germany—we realize how much things can change while students are a part of our lives. Who among us can predict what will happen 13 years from now? What world will today’s five-year-olds be facing when they graduate at age 18? They must be equipped with hopes and dreams, and it’s incumbent upon us to create environments in the context of this changing world that will nurture and cultivate these aspirations.