The New York Times ran a front-page article on Newark schools 17 new principals recruited this year by Cami Anderson, the new schools superintendent, “to run nearly a quarter of the city’s schools… as part of an ambitious plan to rebuild the 39,000-student district, which has long been crippled by low achievement and high dropout rates, but now is flush with up to $200 million from prominent donors, including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook.” Winnie Hu, Troubled District’s Bet: Wave of New Principals, N.Y. Times, Sept. 16, 2011, at A1:
“I believe a strong principal is the key to almost everything,” Ms. Anderson said in an interview. “Where you have great performance, you have great principals, period, full stop. Where you have low performance, you have struggling principals. It’s not that complicated.”
Perhaps prescient is Jonathan Kozol’s discussion of Joe Clark, a school principal in Paterson, New Jersey and a favorite of the Reagan White House “who became the subject of a film and was presented to the public as a salvatory figure”:
Sometimes the dynamic-sounding program introduced by a new principal does have a galvanizing and perceptible effect and one that lasts for more than a few years. In other cases, it is really just an avalanche of words and short-term measures that temporarily establish a degree of calm within the school and sometimes bring a sudden spike in test results or graduation rates, although the academic gains more frequently than not turn out to be short-lived and, in some cases, they have proven to be spurious.
… There are hundreds of principals in our urban schools who are authentic heroes, few of whom… receive the notice and support they deserve. But there is a difference between recognizing the accomplishments of able school officials and the marketing of individuals as saviors of persistently unequal systems. As with the hero children, so too with the hero principals, there is this inclination to avert our eyes from the pervasive injuries inflicted upon students by our acquiescence in a dual system [of apartheid schooling] and to convey the tantalizing notion that the problems of this system can be superseded somehow by a faith in miracles embodied in dynamic and distinctive individuals I don’t believe that this is true. I don’t believe a good school system can be built on miracles or on the stunning interventions of dramatically original and charismatic men or women. I don’t think anyone really believes this.
Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America 199-200 (2005).
