The career decision to leave school leadership is often made twice. The first time is intellectual — when the honest assessment has been done, when the question has been engaged with rigorously, when the conclusion is as clear as it is going to be. The principal in this moment knows what the right decision is….
There is a specific memory that some principals carry — not a dramatic one, not a crisis moment, just a small one that lands with a weight disproportionate to its size. A child’s face at the dinner table. A partner’s question answered with something short and functional. A moment at a school event — not…
Think about what you performed today. Not performed in a pejorative sense — performed in the theatrical sense. The specific version of yourself you presented to each audience that arrived in your building. Composed and decisive for the staff member who needed direction. Warm and accessible for the parent who needed reassurance. Firm and boundaried…
The problem has a face and the face belongs to the person above you. Not a vague institutional dysfunction — a specific supervisor whose specific decisions, specific leadership approach, or specific political agenda is creating conditions in your school that make effective leadership more difficult, or in some cases close to impossible. This is one…
Most principals can produce a leadership philosophy on request. They have written one for a hiring process or articulated one in an introduction to a new staff or referenced one in a professional development presentation about their approach to instructional leadership. The words exist. They describe something that sounds accurate and thoughtful and reasonably complete….
The way a principal leaves a role is professional information. It travels. Not always quickly, not always fairly, but in the education ecosystem — which is smaller than it appears and more interconnected than most people appreciate until they have spent a decade in it — the manner of a departure follows the person more…
The weight of leaving education at fifty is specific and deserves to be named specifically rather than collapsed into the general ‘career transition’ conversation that treats all professional pivots as structurally similar. They are not. Leaving a career at fifty, after twenty or more years inside a single profession, after a professional identity has been…
I want to say this as plainly as I can. I left the principalship. Not because I was asked to leave. Not because the board decided the school needed a different direction. Not because the data told a story of failure or the community had lost confidence or the district had run out of patience….
There is a specific kind of day that principals know and rarely describe accurately, even to themselves. Not the day where things went wrong operationally — those are hard but they are at least categorized, at least named, at least acknowledged by the people around you as having been difficult. The day I’m describing is…
Nobody talks about the resentment. It is one of the most common experiences in the principal role and one of the least named — because naming it carries shame, because it seems incompatible with the image of the servant leader who is doing this work for the right reasons, because admitting it means admitting that…