Carnegie Reporter
Vol. 4/No. 1
Fall 2006

Click here to see story on the Carnegie Web Site

The School Leadership Crisis
Have School Principals Been Left Behind?

by Anne Grosso De León

Into the room the principal escorts the Staten Island Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Martin Wolfson. They don’t acknowledge my existence. They don’t apologize for interrupting the class. They walk up and down the aisles, peering at student papers. They pick them up for a closer look. Superintendent shows one to the principal. Superintendent frowns and purses his lips. Principal purses his lips. Class understands these are significant and important people. To show loyalty and solidarity they refrain from asking for the pass.

Frank McCourt Teacher Man: A Memoir (Scribner, 2005) The kabuki-like drama described by Frank McCourt in his memoir, Teacher Man, which chronicles his thirty-year teaching career in New York City’s public high schools, unfolded more than forty years ago. Even so, to all who have ever studied or taught in an American school, the drama is disconcertingly familiar. In a flash we are all anxiously on guard. Who doesn’t remember vividly the day on which the school principal made an unannounced classroom visit to “observe”—occasionally with an even higher official in tow? It was invariably a day that put everybody on edge. Students visualized detentions for their lack of preparation. Teachers visualized unfavorable letters in their files for having such embarrassingly unprepared students. What McCourt suggests, but does not say explicitly, is that the lip-pursing principal, who typically did not have the faintest idea of what McCourt might be doing in his English class that day, was also clearly on edge. As poor Principal Wolfson mimicked the superintendent’s movements and expressions, he kept a close eye on the superintendent anxiously trying to divine whether disaster or success lay in his immediate future. The scene is as poignant as it is comical.

How “significant and important” a person can this principal be?

The answer to this question is as befuddling today as it was forty years ago. By definition, the principal—as the school’s highest-ranking official—is indeed “a significant and important” person. Yet the metaphors currently being used by experts to describe the plight of the nation’s school principals—“exposed,” “deer caught in the headlights,” “in the hot seat,” “in a vise,” “in the eye of a storm,” to name a few—are deeply troubling. How on earth did the job of principal come to be seen in the alarming way it is today? Moreover, why do school principals feel so besieged?

Some would argue that the educational reform movement of the past two decades, culminating in the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, has moved American education into an era of high accountability with heightened expectations regarding student achievement and learning—and with serious penalties for schools that fail to perform. “As No Child Left Behind has moved America’s schools into an era of accountability,” says Vartan Gregorian, president of Carnegie Corporation of New York, “the focus of American education has been on testing. The focus, however, must and will change to performance and leadership if the goal of creating effective schools in America is to be realized.” Above all, says Gregorian, “It is the principal as instructional leader who is crucial to the effectiveness of the nation’s nearly 96,000 schools.”

Alas, the critical role of instructional leader is only one of a dizzying array of roles the school principal is required to play in today’s educational environment. According to a recent study on school leadership published by the Stanford Educational Leadership Institute with support from the Wallace Foundation, “. . .[T]he role of principal has swelled to include a staggering array of professional tasks and competencies. Principals are expected to be educational visionaries, instructional and curriculum leaders, assessment experts, disciplinarians, community builders, public relations and communications experts, budget analysts, facility managers, special programs administrators, as well as guardians of various legal, contractual, and policy mandates and initiatives. In addition, principals are expected to serve the often conflicting needs and interests of many stakeholders, including students, parents, teachers, district office officials, unions, and state and federal agencies.”

The “job” of school principal, it turns out, has evolved into an overwhelming, hydra-like phenomenon that requires knowledge and skills that many school principals simply do not have. Nevertheless, observes Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP), the school principal is “held responsible for just about everything under the sun.” S/he is weighed down by a staggering array of responsibilities without corresponding authority over basic issues such as hiring and firing, school budgets, curriculums, bonuses, and training. Moreover, the process by which individuals aspire to become principals and the preparation they receive to do the job are widely regarded as deeply flawed.

“In the corporate world,” says Tirozzi, “leadership is never an afterthought.” Corporate boards seek the most capable leader they can find. It is rare indeed that a corporate board regards a person who has earned an MBA as an automatic candidate for CEO. Yet as recently as ten years ago, according to Daniel Fallon, chair of the Education Division of Carnegie Corporation, the typical “path” to becoming a school principal has largely consisted of the aspiring principal—self-selected, usually male, and more often a former athlete or coach—taking a set of courses at night to obtain “certification.” For the principal whose management skills and experience were largely limited to managing high school athletic teams, there could be little certainty that he knew and understood what was demanded of him in this extremely complex leadership role. That was then. Now, according to Fallon, principal preparation is “a rapidly moving field. It is vastly different today than it was ten years ago, and it will continue to be different tomorrow.”

Even so, unlike other professions, the current practice still offers no “internship” or in-training apprenticeship for principals. As a result, the newly “certified” principal is in for a rude awakening that first day on the job. Certainly school principals receive greater financial compensation than teachers. However, as Fallon points out, “They work eleven months, not nine, and they have a hell of a lot more headaches.” Much of the 12-to-15 hours a day the new principal spends at work will be consumed dealing with vending machines and broken furnaces, and a wide range of problems including school safety, nutrition, health, housing, employment, drugs, and violence. And, yes, says Gerald Tirozzi, in the remaining time, the principal will keep an eye on the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) linchpin that requires schools to “show significant progress in student achievement as measured by their states’ proficiency tests.” Moreover, according to Tirozzi, there is that proverbial elephant in the room—the glaring, seemingly intractable “issue of equity in this country.” There are “two Americas,” says Tirozzi, and only one of them has a focus on instruction.

Judy B. Codding, vice president of programs for the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) and director of NCEE’s America’s Choice Design Network, would probably agree. As a former high school principal at two high-performing, affluent high schools in New York and a low-performing, inner-city high school in Los Angeles, Codding is well-acquainted with the two Americas. The spectacle of one of her students in Los Angeles trying to do his homework under a street lamp because he had no electricity at home is seared into her memory. “In the Scarsdales of America,” she says, “[as principal] you are focused on instruction and learning. In inner cities, instruction is in the background. I had to bring it forward.” The award-winning former principal says that the challenge in Los Angeles was “to get the faculty to believe that students can achieve and to get students to believe that the faculty believes in them.” She adds, “It takes strong leadership—but you [also] have to have a system in place,” a system in which the focus is on developing strategies on behalf of instruction.

Like Tirozzi, Codding views the function of the principal as similar to that of a CEO. The problem, she says, is principals don’t see “the connection between what they [are] expected to do, and how they [are] prepared.” The reason, according to Codding, is that schools of education simply have not done the job of preparing principals to make that connection. Sadly, she says, schools of education tend to function largely as “cash cows” for the university. With millions of dollars a year spent on curriculum, there is “still no coherence in the curriculum for the training of principals.”

Training For A Revolution

By the end of the 1990s, as the number of experienced principals opting for early retirement continued to increase, the number of qualified applicants for positions as principals continued to decline. Attempts to recruit even minimally qualified candidates, especially in school districts in low-income areas, became increasingly difficult. Carnegie Corporation of New York invited NCEE to examine the critical question of school leadership—and to produce a plan for the training of key educational leaders and managers, focusing on school principals. The goal was to design a plan based on the best research and best practices available and, at the same time, take a look at how other institutions such as business and the military addressed the issue of leadership training. Joining Carnegie Corporation in this effort were the Broad Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund.

One result of the two-year NCEE study was the publication in 2005 of The Principal Challenge, Leading and Managing Schools in an Era of Accountability (2005), a virtual primer on the school leadership crisis. Edited by NCEE president Marc S. Tucker and Judy Codding, The Principal Challenge contains nine reports by experts commissioned to examine the “causes and cures” of the school leadership crisis as well as a report by Tucker and Codding that provides an overview of the school leadership crisis entitled “Preparing Principals in the Age of Accountability.”

A second outcome of the study was the establishment of the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL), which, according to Codding, set out to answer the question: “What will it take to train principals to lead a revolution?”

The search for an answer led to an intensive examination of best practices used in business and the military in the training of managers and leaders. As the former provost of the National War College in Washington, D.C., with 26 years of military service behind him, NISL vice president, Dr. Robert C. Hughes, is keenly aware that “In the military, it is assumed you will need to be taught.” Indeed, Hughes observes, in professional military education, the qualifications for each job and career are always clearly defined, and the focus has always been on instruction and practice. It is a step-by-step process through which strengths and skills are built, a system that must remain both “flexible and robust.” It is unfortunate, he says, that in the education of school principals, there has always been a “loose coupling between the principal and instruction.”

In creating learning communities that are focused on practice, NISL is essentially “cohort-based.” In the NISL Executive Development Program, the NISL faculty provides instruction, organized according to a standards-based curriculum, to leadership teams selected from among local educators. These leadership teams—comprised of up to twelve educators, depending on the number of principals to be trained— teach the NISL curriculum to local principals. Leadership teams eventually become NISL-certified instructors. Hughes emphasizes that “The superintendent must be deeply engaged,” otherwise the training effort will not succeed. Instruction is conducted in face-to-face workshops, seminars, and study groups and through the use of state-of-the-art interactive web-based learning. Leading experts are featured in the curriculum. The NISL program is spread out over a year-and-a-half to two years, and includes two summer institutes. NISL projects are now in place in school districts in Alabama, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

In 2005, NISL incorporated as a profit-making institution. Observes Hughes, “If colleges and universities had a handle on [principal preparation], businesses like NISL wouldn’t exist.” The research is clear, he says, “Without practice and application through initiatives and mentoring and coaching, [principal preparation] is a waste of time.”

The Distributed Leadership Perspective: We Don’t Need Another Hero

While there is general agreement among educators and policymakers about the vital role played by the school principal in establishing strong learning environments, there is also a growing consensus among education experts that in today’s complex, rapidly changing global educational environment, a school leadership model that relies too heavily on one individual may, in fact, no longer make much sense. The professional jargon reflects this changing perception: principals are now “facilitators,” “collaborators,” and “team players.” One expert, James P. Spillane, professor of human development, social policy and learning science at Northwestern University, has focused on exploring the “distributed leadership” perspective, a model that focuses on “where the world of classroom teaching meets practice.” According to Spillane, perhaps the most important question is “What do people [in the instructional process] do?” What are the routines? Who performs them and why? What purposes do they serve? What are the tools of the trade used in these routines? How do those involved in the instructional process actually make use of textbooks, software, and curriculum? How do the “leaders” and the “followers” and their “situations” interact?

To determine how leadership practice actually works—or does not work—in a given school, Spillane emphasizes that a start-up time of at least six months is required to stand back and observe the instructional practices and interactions in place. Only then, he says, can new routines be designed, specifically tailored to help education practitioners—administrators, teachers, and specialists—to approach their work in more imaginative and productive ways.

A “leadership-plus approach,” he says, which closely monitors routines and structures, requires study of the “how” as well as the “what” of leadership. On the other hand, Spillane regards with skepticism an attitude that fosters hope that a charismatic, heroic leader will magically emerge (he refers to it as the “heroics of the leadership genre”). The distributed leadership perspective does not offer a prescription for developing school leadership, asserts Spillane, rather, it offers “a framework for thinking about leadership differently.” While the principal is a critical member of the leadership team, educational leadership is fundamentally about leadership practice.

Spillane’s work is now part of the Distributed Leadership Study in thirteen Chicago K-5 and K-8 public schools. While NCLB has helped push the school leadership question high on the American education agenda, in the new “flat world” of the twenty-first century, the question of school leadership has emerged as an issue of urgent global concern. Accordingly, Spillane’s distributed leadership research has been getting a great deal of attention in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and China.

Another model that has engendered interest on the part of educators and school administrators is the “shared leadership team,” in which different education professionals share the post of principal, often in sequential multi-week shifts. In 2004, Ralph Carducci, who was the career technical education director for the Monroe public schools, participated in a shared leadership team at Monroe High School in Monroe, Michigan after the school’s principal resigned. All major decisions concerning the school or any problems were considered by the entire team. At the time, he commented that, “It’s a learning process for all of us.” Carducci has since been appointed the school’s principal.

Wanted: A New Generation Of Principals

New York City’s vast public school system, with 1.1 million children enrolled in over 1,400 schools, would seem to present both abundant opportunities and a cavernous need for the distributed leadership perspective. Dr. Sandra Stein is the chief executive officer of the NYC Leadership Academy, a $70 million principal preparation program established in January 2003 as a nonprofit organization largely with philanthropic and corporate funding. Stein agrees that distributed leadership is a worthy goal. The Academy, she says, emphasizes with its participants that their goal “should not be to try to be the lone hero of the school, but rather to create a team where leadership is embodied in more than one person.”  She notes that she doesn’t believe that “it’s possible for one person to solve the complex challenges faced by many of our schools so that a critical skill of a school leader is the ability to draw on the collective wisdom of the school team in order to move school performance forward.”

That is the goal. In the meantime, until “we have gotten this into the drinking water,” she says, the NYC Leadership Academy is attending to the immediate task at hand: the recruitment, training, and support of a new generation of principals who will form a core leadership focused, above all, on improved instruction and student learning and achievement.

Since 2001-2002, an astounding 730 of New York City’s more than 1,400 principals have left their jobs. In May 2006, The New York Times reported that as recently as 2000 there were more principals over the age of 60 than under the age of 41. By the fall of 2005, there were four times as many principals under the age of 41 as over 60.

In responding to this turnover, the city’s Department of Education found itself facing a dramatically “different attitude toward career,” says Stein. Indeed, she points out, the “lifer” model is an increasingly rare phenomenon and in its place has emerged an increasingly “non-linear view of career.” In the face of this shift in the labor market, the NYC Leadership Academy decided to look to men and women in the system who had at least three years of K-12 teaching experience, who “aspired” to become principals, and who were willing to make a hefty fourteen-month commitment to obtain the necessary leadership training. The three-part Aspiring Principals Program training includes an intensive six-week summer training program, a year’s residency or apprenticeship under the guidance and supervision of an experienced mentor principal, and another intensive summer session during which the aspiring principal develops plans for his or her actual school assignment. Graduates of the program commit to a minimum of five years of service.

The Aspiring Principals Program is “premised on a social justice agenda,” explains Courtney Welsh, executive vice-president for strategic planning at the Leadership Academy. As such, graduates of the program are “hired into the schools that need them most,” says Welsh, adding that “on average,” graduates serving as principals are serving in “lower-performance, high-poverty schools.” In the class of 2005-2006, graduates ranged in age between 26 and 59 with 40 the average age; more than half of the new principals were African-American, Latino, or Asian; and two-thirds were women. In 2005-2006, 94 candidates enrolled in the program, and it is expected that approximately 75 will complete it. All graduates are assigned coaches during their first year of work as principals. “They are getting a lot of on-the-job support,” observes Welsh.

Interest in the program is intense, both at home and abroad. The NYC Leadership Academy has hosted hundreds of visitors and conducted many telephone conferences where participants are encouraged to ask technical questions on “nitty-gritty” issues. Declares Stein, “Anything we can figure out we will give away.”

Some have been critical of the high cost of the program. Starting in 2006-2007, the New York City Department of Education will “[pay] the salaries of people while they are training,” says Stein, pointing out that “[The candidates] are working during their training and making a contribution.” This is just one model, she says, and obviously there are different approaches to addressing the issue of cost.

Building A Hierarchical Team

Still another New York City reform effort aimed at addressing the school leadership crisis is “SAM”—or the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model, a comprehensive school reform model that focuses on developing school leadership teams comprised of the principal and groups of faculty who work in real-life—not simulated—school situations, typically, with groups of struggling students in selected New York City schools. SAM was developed jointly in the spring of 2003 by New Visions for Public Schools, an educational reform organization that focuses on New York City’s public school children, and the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College of the City University of New York in collaboration with the NYC Leadership Academy.

“The Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model,” explains Constancia Warren, Carnegie Corporation senior program officer and director of the foundation’s Urban High School Initiatives, “grew out of Baruch College’s Aspiring Leaders Program (ALP), designed originally at the request of Anthony Alvarado, former superintendent of Community School District 2, as a way of insuring a good supply of leaders for the school district.” The ALP initiative involved “adapting the business school practice of having students work in teams on case studies, and of having a mandated set of courses and a supported internship,” says Warren. The process of selecting candidates for the program “involved the selection of instructionally excellent candidates by the district, rather than the traditional self-nomination, often by teachers anxious to get out of the classroom.” At the time, she explains, “It was New York City’s most rigorous program for training principals, both because of its curriculum and its selection process.”

Originally designed to train principals for K-8 placements, SAM received an initial grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York to develop and field-test a school leadership program that would address the challenges faced by high school leaders engaged in school reform efforts. Slated for eventual national replication, the program has since received support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education.

Using the apprenticeship model, SAM provides participants with release time from their job responsibilities to participate in instruction aimed at learning and practicing the skills needed to improve their capacity to lead within their own schools. According to Nell Scharf, lead facilitator for SAM, the program makes use of a pedagogy that is richly “experiential and problem-based.” The program’s components include an introductory four-week summer “intensive,” weekly seminars, daily apprenticeships, monthly “inter-visitations” in which participants visit other schools to broaden their knowledge and understanding, monthly on-site coaching by facilitators who provide individual and team support, and other activities such as reading and assignments organized around specific tasks.

The SAM curriculum was developed by New Visions for Public School staff, university faculty, and participating school administrators with a view to developing “a critical mass” of change agents in the participating schools. The program’s aim is to produce a leadership core that can work independently and in teams, using the same language and sharing the same goals and a common approach. The “scaffolding” effect of SAM is intended to result in a truly distributed leadership and continuity provided by a hierarchical team. The program is currently being field-tested in four high schools.

“SAM has exceeded our expectations,” says Warren. “What we had not anticipated was that these hierarchical teams—each one interning one level above their current position and working on data and problem-solving cases drawn from their own schools—would not only be effective as a way of developing leaders, but would also turn into a model for school improvement.”

Whatever It Takes

The words—they appear to be the school motto—are imprinted on the masthead of the principal’s weekly newsletter at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia: “Whatever it takes.” A conversation with the school’s principal, Dr. Mel J. Riddile, named 2006 Met/Life/NASSP National High School Principal of the Year, suggests strongly that it is a motto with muscle and that the man who coined it is a man with a mission.

Upon arriving at J.E.B. Stuart High School nine years ago, Riddile, who holds an earned doctorate in organizational development from Vanderbilt University, saw that attendance was poor. “Kids [didn’t] come to school and they [couldn’t] read,” he says. He wanted to know why and moved quickly to establish some baseline literacy testing. Recalling that he had to get permission from the area superintendent to do the testing, Riddile points out that at that time, such testing—reading assessment of high school students—“sounded odd” to many. Observes Riddile drily, some people said, “Mel turned over a rock.” What he learned from the testing was profoundly disturbing: 74 percent of his students were reading more than three years below grade level.

Riddile held a school “literacy summit” to study the reading assessment data. Acknowledging that all this activity was initially met with resistance by some teachers, he nonetheless moved ahead by establishing a school-wide reading initiative, something that he believed strongly was essential to improving student achievement. Improving student literacy was the key not only to improving student performance on the SOL (Standards of Learning), the Virginia state assessment, and on the SAT, he explains, but to encouraging and empowering students—particularly minority students—to take more upper-level courses. At the same time, he realized that teachers would require instruction if they were to teach reading. As a result, Riddile explains, J.E.B. Stuart High School became “One of the first schools to have a literacy coach to teach teachers.” Today, he says, “All of our teachers are teachers of reading.”

The J.E.B. Stuart High School reading program has become a national model for improving high school literacy and is featured in Creating a Culture of Literacy: A Guide for Middle and High School Principals (National Association of Secondary School Principals, 2005) a publication made possible in part by Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“This school had every reason to fail,” says Riddile, noting that students at J.E.B. Stuart High School suffered from the destructive effects of poverty that rob young people of hope and a belief in their own future. Ignoring the dismal odds, the school community, led by their principal, looked at each other and declared, “The bottom line is we’re going to succeed!” Riddile acknowledges that they spent a lot of time on discussion and reflection. “We had to learn as we went along and to pretty much invent the wheel.” Perhaps most important, according to Riddile, the entire school community was unified in their commitment to “working toward a common goal and sharing a common vision.” At J.E.B. Stuart High School, the heart of that vision is the unshakable belief that all students can succeed at learning.

“Our business is to help kids to grow and learn to become responsible adults. It’s about the future of these kids. . . . It’s not about test scores,” says Riddile. The scores are “just evidence.”

Even so, in 1998 it was test score “evidence” that labeled J.E.B. Stuart High as a “failing school.” Today the school is a national model for serving disadvantaged students, named a “Breakthrough High School” by the Gates Foundation and NASSP. The mounting evidence of student achievement that has accumulated in the intervening years, including rising SOL and SAT scores and the introduction of the International Baccalaureate Program, is impressive and can be traced directly to the unwavering commitment of Riddile and his staff to achieving literacy for all their students. The pre- and post-testing of all students, a literacy program led by a literacy coach, job-embedded staff development, a reading lab, and mandatory after-school tutoring for all at-risk students were among the “best practices” that contributed to improved teaching and student learning. In addition, the staff took steps to increase positive interactions between students and adults outside the classroom, including using community agencies to establish on-campus family service programs and providing individual and group counseling and family support. Rising ninth graders are provided a two-week summer program providing instruction in study skills and general orientation; during their freshman year, students are assigned mentors.

“To survive and thrive,” says Riddile, “[students and teachers] had to work together.” On July 1, 2006, Mel Riddile moved on to lead T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He is confident that the work that he and the J.E.B. Stuart High School community began will be nurtured and advanced by his successor, Pamela Jones, former teacher, department chair, and previously assistant principal at J.E.B. Stuart High School.

When It All Comes Together

When it all comes together—a focus on practice, a commitment to student learning and achievement, cooperation and collaboration between school and school district, and broad community participation—the way is paved for a talented school administrator like Mel Riddile to lead. Experts like Judy Codding, Gerald Tirozzi, James Spillane, and Sandra Stein would be quick to point out that Mel Riddile is hardly alone out there. Despite the formidable problems they face—complex social and economic inequities that stand like huge, immovable boulders in the path of students’ educational achievement—countless skilled, dedicated school principals are not bailing out but have chosen to soldier on in schools throughout America. Like Mel Riddile, these men and women are educators who love their work and love even more the children put in their charge. They tend to work at their tasks as if the future of the republic depended on their efforts—which, of course, it does.

Programs like NISL, the NYC Leadership Academy, and SAM reflect a growing awareness that the creation and nurturing of effective schools in this era of accountability cannot take place without effective instructional leadership, and that the training for such leadership depends on intensive clinical practice and supported internships and mentoring, not a handful of courses taken at night. In the increasingly complex world that students face today, success in the globalizing economy will depend on the level of excellence and depth of training their education has provided them. America’s students and their families—and surely principals themselves—expect no less of those who have taken on the critical task of leading the educational programs that will prepare the nation’s children for their future.

At the same time, as NASSP Executive Director Gerald Tirozzi has pointed out, the school principal cannot be expected to accept exclusive responsibility for student achievement in this era of accountability. Until our nation’s policymakers effectively address the problems of poverty, poor health screening and care, inadequate housing, and unemployment—problems that continue to stand in the way of educational reform—the challenge of producing evidence of “Adequate Yearly Progress” will remain an annual Sisyphean ritual for the nation’s school principals, with continuing catastrophic results for all our children.

Observes Tirozzi, “If accountability is the mantra of the land, why not share the accountability with policymakers, who insist on high achievement yet fashion policies that undermine that goal”?

Sidebar: A Principal’s Manifesto

Dr. Mel J. Riddile, principal at J.E.B. Stuart High School in Falls Church, Virginia, for nine years, was named the 2006 Met/Life NASSP National High School Principal. During his tenure, he communicated with the school community in a weekly newsletter, Doc’s.doc. On October 17, 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 9), Riddile reflected on Hurricane Katrina and the fate of those many victims who were quite literally “left behind.” Following are excerpts from that essay, entitled “Not On Our Watch.”

The images of Hurricane Katrina victims stranded on rooftops waiting to be rescued still haunt me. . . .These pictures may be the best advertisement ever for the importance of an education. . . . [W]hat we do here is not about school. . . [I]t is about the lives of our students and their futures. Many of our students don’t have educated parents who can encourage them and advocate for them. We are all that our kids have. If we don’t do it for them, who will?

To enter the middle class and have the chance for a better life, our students must have a quality high school experience that adequately prepares all of them for post-secondary education. If we don’t make this happen in this school, where will our students get that education?

In our world, there are no remedial jobs. Our students either receive a quality education or they will be forced to accept those few low-paying jobs that are available. Our school is our students’ only chance. If these students don’t get an education now, when will they get one?

Let us resolve here and now, that on our watch, no Stuart student will ever be stranded on a rooftop waiting to be rescued. Let each one of us rededicate ourselves to doing Whatever It Takes to ensure that all of our students have the life choices that an education can provide.

For more information about this research, please contact:

Dr. Michelle LaPointe
Research Director
Stanford School Leadership Study
principalstudy@stanford.edu