Principals: The Next Generation

Last year I spent a Saturday morning participating in a mock interview process designed to help New Leaders for New Schools participants prepare to get their first jobs as school principals. I left with two strong impressions: (1) being a principal is an even harder job than I'd thought, and (2) the candidates, many of whom were 30 or younger, seemed exceptionally bright, focused, and up to the challenge.

So I was glad to see the article in today's NYTimes focusing on the rapidly growing number of young principals in the New York City school system. This is an important issue--the long-awaited demographic turnover driven by retiring baby boomers has arrived, with potentially seismic consequences for education.

But the article's focus--whether youthful principals are up to the considerable challenge of running an urban school--is too narrow. The most important question is not whether new principals are better than retiring principals in the short term. The real issue is the long-term impact of a new generation of leaders who may have very different ideas about how to lead public schools.

Harvard's Susan Moore Johnson has done some great work focusing on inter-generational difference between teachers, and the same questions apply at the leadership level. While public education is often characterized as a huge, immobile blob, impervious to reform, this may turn out to be the long-sought-for unstoppable force to change things--not new laws or policies but the steady accumulation of new people implementing new ideas, one by one.