A Different Type of Principal

What comes around goes around.

Back in the 1990s, when I was a middle school and high school principal, educational researchers told us about the importance of school principals and their effectiveness on teachers, parents, and most importantly, student outcomes.

Now, a report released last month, titled “The Principal Effect: How Investing in School Leaders Is Key to Solving Education’s Challenges,” finds that effective principals, in both high- and low-performing schools, play a critical role in retaining teachers, improving students’ academic performance, and maintaining a positive school culture. The new report was written by a team at the Learning Policy Institute, a California-based research organization and think tank.

The report goes on to say that,

“Principals are responsible for creating the conditions that help students and teachers thrive. Effective principals include teachers in setting academic goals, provide coaching, and foster collaboration, which are linked to improvements in students’ grades…. This creates a fortuitous cycle: better grades and working conditions retain teachers for longer and bring stability and continuity that positively impact students.”

The lead author of the report is Linda Darling-Hammond. Darling-Hammond, an educational reformer and past college professor, has been around America’s K-12 landscape for nearly a half century. She now serves as chief knowledge officer at the Learning Policy Institute. Here are excerpts from Darling-Hammond’s recent interview with EdWeek:

“…I would still say that there’s [too little] attention to the importance of training and preparing principals and recruiting and retaining them. We’ve made very little investment overall compared to some other countries that I’ve studied, where they really understand the importance of the leadership pipeline.”

“In the U.S., we throw money down the drain to spend a lot more to patch up the results of not having done it right the first time. If you don’t invest in [a] well-prepared teaching and leadership workforce, you will have fewer kids who succeed. You will have to spend more on summer school, on retention, and down the road, on the criminal justice system. Not making the obvious investments on the front end ends up costing us a lot later on in ways that are much less productive. This thought process needs to be embedded in our policy making.”

“Where [aspiring principals] train should be in schools where there is a structure for teacher collaboration. They also need to understand that the way you design time and opportunities in a school schedule is a principal’s responsibility, and that they can organize a schedule that has teacher collaboration built into it. There are lots of ways to do it, but some people have never seen it and don’t know how. It’s a different model of school design that principals need to know about.”

“Principals also need to know how to support teachers in collaborating effectively. How do you develop a shared vision that everyone contributes to, and then how do you implement that in a way that keeps people returning to the vision? If you have a vision about a way in which literacy will permeate the school, teachers need to think together a bout which practices work and [make] decisions about how they want to implement them across the school in a coherent way.”

“When people are working together towards a shared vision, when they have the time and opportunity and support for collaboration, it becomes a better place to work. When teachers get moral and pedagogical support from their leaders, they are more likely to want to stay.”

This all sounds well and good. But these comments from Darling-Hammond, instead of coming from a 2026 report on the importance of school principals, could have been written 30 years ago. And if that’s the case, then Darling-Hammond’s comments forces us to ask this question:

If principal leadership is so important to teacher well-being, parent support, and student outcomes, why hasn’t America, as a nation, taken action to build an infrastructure that recruits, retains, and rewards outstanding campus leaders?

Yes, we’ve seen pockets of success across our country, but far too many areas still struggle with placing outstanding leaders inside campuses, no matter whether those campuses are elementary or secondary.

The same struggles with school leadership we faced in the 1990s are the same struggles we face in 2026.

What comes around goes around.

Maybe it’s time for a different type of leadership model. Maybe it’s time to recruit, retain, and reward adult learning leaders who take ownership of a group of 20 young learners, working with each of them to make them smarter and stronger in their reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development abilities. We already to some of this on a daily basis inside our elementary schools.

Most education leaders, like Linda Darling-Hammond, are stuck in the 20^th century, believing that schools can be improved if only we found more talented principals, better trained teachers, more supportive parents and families, and more motivated students.

We’ve tried all that, and it hasn’t worked.

It’s time for a new system of learning.

Til tomorrow. SVB