Principals are always in the middle. They navigate the space between parents and teachers and between teachers and students. They mediate the messages of district leaders and share back the experiences of their school community. Success is usually defined by finding the common ground and having empathy for everyone who walks through the school doors.
The role isn’t one that appeals to those who want a radically different experience for young people. At the very least it doesn’t appeal to too many for too long. The pressure to tolerate incremental improvement while losing generations of opportunity is strong. Few leaders have the courage to know doing their job well could lead to losing it.
However, attacks on curriculum in the classroom, efforts to squelch strategies to highlight Black excellence, and raids of terror on our schools serving citizens with undocumented guardians means that we need school leaders more ready for revolution.
I talk to principals almost every day about their hopes and dreams for their schools. Many are largely willing to take professional risks in order to better serve their children and what they are looking for are co-conspirators. They are looking for folks to put pressure on the power centers of our system from the outside to give them the clarity of purpose, legitimacy, and support to make more transformational changes.
They are looking for parents to step up and agitate.
Here in Chicago, we have seen the power of this partnership both in how some schools have responded to the armed occupation of our city by federal forces and in how some schools have responded to neglect by our city’s own leadership. The forces for status quo schooling that leaves many behind are surprisingly still bipartisan.
Like people in many cities attacked in the last year by our government, Chicagoans have launched ways to keep our children safe. There are school patrols and coordinated transportation led predominantly by parents. Principals are part of this work, sharing information and making introductions between people needing support and those who can provide it. There have been student walkouts and protests. Principals are providing guidance in ways that maximize student safety without taking away student agency and ownership of their movement. In some cases, principals help adjust curriculum plans and assessments so that the cost for student participation in protest is not so steep.
We also have school communities in our city who have been neglected by our municipal government for decades or who have had their resources plundered so that those with better access to power can enrich their own neighborhoods. In these cases where the people in power have direct control of our institutions and can punish employees disproportionately to their actions, parents have to be the face of the movement. There are school communities suffering overcrowding, compounded by broken promises of building expansions twenty years ago. There are other schools that never received additional resources when they took on students from closed buildings.
Principals stay late so that families can meet and organize. Families attend board meetings and invite journalists on tours. Principals help make sure that families are advocating to people in leadership who can actually make decisions and bring on change. Revolutions run on the energy of agitators fueled by the quiet connectors. For schools wanting to do more for children, these can be good fitting roles for parents and principals.
We can’t create the learning communities our young people require if we leave out the middle. Our principals in the middle are critical to the information sharing and relationship building that radical transformation will demand. Our principals need us to do our part as parents and community members and act upon that information and invest in those relationships.
