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 Dennis Littky,
Co-Director of The Met and & Big Picture Company
If you have a strong commitment to Coalition principles and have shown leadership in your school, if you are passionate and ready to take your skills to the next level, then I would love it if you would consider being a school principal. If you have moral courage, you have what it takes.
We need new leaders. We need more women, we need more people of color. We need more visionaries ready to share their ideas and influence. We need school leaders who understand that being a strong principal means everyone else in the school has a voice. You can be a strong principal and have teachers feel they are leading the school and make your parents’ needs and interests major decision-making factors.
Unfortunately, most good teachers have a pretty bad image of the role of the principal. I want people to begin to understand that, especially in small, personalized, democratic schools, the principalship is a fantastic job that allows your great ideas and strong philosophy to help lead people in the right direction. The excitement of a whole school moving together is invigorating. A good principal is a part of a great team.
We are ready for a new generation of principals to lead our current Coalition schools when their principals move on, and we need a whole new slew of great leaders to start new Coalition schools. We are ready to expand, and we need people trained through their direct work in Coalition schools to be the leaders who spread the ideas.
Be bold. Take a step
out. Put all your
experience and knowledge
to good use. Get
your principal certificate!
Take over a school!
Start a school! Lead,
lead, lead! It is
one of the greatest
jobs in the world.
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 Jill Davidson,
Horace Editor
Alternately optimistic and grudging on a Sunday afternoon, I prepared for the teaching week ahead.
“A Prairie Home Companion”
played on National Public Radio, and I half-listened to Garrison Keillor’s snapshot of Lake Wobegon’s small-town politics. In the midst of my late-weekend drift, one sentence of his monologue hit me hard and I never forgot it.
“The thing about democracy,” Keillor observed, “is that it’s made for people with lots of time on their hands.”
School people tend not have a lot of time on their hands, of course. Traditionally, teachers spend most of their time in the classroom with their students. Rather than tilting against intractable bureaucracies and sorting out differences with colleagues, teachers make themselves comfortable in the universe behind the shut classroom door. Principals and administrators make decisions, teachers teach, everyone avoids conflict, and the wheels keep turning.
But this picture is no longer the only picture. Schools nationwide are adopting leadership and management methods that include teachers, students and families. Principals and other school administrators are reshaping their roles. For years, educators in CES schools have been working together in critical friends groups, in interdisciplinary teams, in site councils. These experiences have both nurtured the skills necessary to create more democratic leadership structures and have also demonstrated the incredible power of putting heads together in democratic forums. The good news is that—with the right choices about where to spend group time and energy—democracy can work, even among people with not quite enough time on their hands.
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