The monolingual system is not neutral. It was built around a specific set of assumptions about language, culture, family structure, and the relationship between the institution of school and the communities it serves. Those assumptions were not universal. They were the assumptions of a particular cultural majority, embedded into the architecture of public education at…
There are schools that are described as priorities in the equity language of the district’s strategic plan and funded as afterthoughts in the budget process. Schools whose communities have the least access to the political levers that produce resources, and who therefore receive the least of the resources that the district theoretically distributes on the…
The superintendent changes. Or the assistant superintendent who was your most reliable institutional support accepts a position in another district. Or the board election changes the political composition in ways that will shift priorities from the top down. The institutional context in which you have been leading — the relationships, the understood priorities, the informal…
The consulting transition appears cleaner from the outside than it is from the inside. The former principal who moves into educational consulting seems to have made the elegant exit — take the expertise, remove the institutional burden, advise the people still in the buildings you left. The knowledge transfers. The network is already in place….
I want to tell you what I am aware of when I sit down to write these posts. I am aware that the things I am naming here — the loneliness, the structural weight, the accumulated cost of sustained leadership under insufficient support — are things that many people in professional positions above the principalship…
You wanted this. Let’s start there, because everything else in this post needs that as its foundation. You did not stumble into the principalship. You worked for it — the degrees, the certifications, the years in the classroom, the assistant principalship that was part stepping stone and part proving ground, the application process, the interview,…
There is a version of you that exists at work. Competent, accountable, steady, visible in the ways the role requires. This version shows up reliably, performs at a high level, and is known to most of the professional world as who you are. And then there is the version that used to show up at…
There is a specific school leadership experience that produces a particular kind of professional despair — and that is the experience of watching what was originally a learning culture transform, through sustained accountability pressure, into a test-preparation culture. The classrooms that used to carry genuine intellectual curiosity replaced by classrooms organized entirely around the remediation…
The principal who advocates loudly and frequently for their school eventually acquires a label. Not always explicitly — sometimes it lives in the specific neutrality of a supervisor’s tone when they reference you in a room you are not in. Sometimes it is more direct. Difficult. Resistant. Not a team player. And the frustrating reality…
The stay that is chosen is a different thing from the stay that is defaulted into. I have said this before in this blog and I will say it again here from a different angle — because the principal who needs to hear it most is not the one who is clearly done. It is…