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…
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…
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….
I see you. And I need to tell you something that most of the people around you are not going to say, because saying it complicates the narrative about how this role works and what it requires. You do not need to work harder. I know that feels wrong. I know the gap between where…
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…