ON an otherwise normal school day in the winter of 2004, the principal of a well-regarded big-city high school walked out of his office during lunch period to find hundreds of students sitting on the floors of the halls in an act of protest. About 20% of the school's 3,000 students, upset that he had closed off the hallway areas where they hung out and socialized during their free periods, had organized in defiance. The scene was a principal's nightmare. Mr. Randolph (let us call him) knew the power of his office; he could summon security guards, identify all the students participating in the protest, and mete out consequences for their disruption. But he could not erase the dramatic image before him. And he knew that this moment had just taken root in the school's institutional memory, as well, to grow larger and more vivid every time students retold it. An experienced principal, Mr. Randolph spent much of his professional life trying to keep order in his school. He had plenty of good reasons for his earlier decision about the hallways, and he knew that he could deal with this new crisis. But as he faced the mass of young people in the halls that day, he realized that the students had their own culture in his high school, and he was a stranger to it. Very few students have ever sat down in the hallways to express their alienation from the way their high school works. More often, kids adopt a more indirect form of resistance. They come in late or ditch their classes. They act up in class or simply sit through it passively, passing notes. One or two might write critical editorials in the school paper; lots more scrawl graffiti on the walls. Some start fights or set fires in the bathroom wastebaskets. But all these actions have one thing in common with the sit-in at Mr. Randolph's school. They are messages, sent to the principal by high school students. And if we know how to read them, those messages contain the crucial ingredients of school success. In the current climate of school improvement, no one feels more pressure than a high school principal. If you head up a high school--whether large or small, urban or suburban or rural--you bear responsibility not just for the organization's daily functioning but for the performance of its students in high school and beyond. You hire and supervise teachers. You set expectations and consequences for behavior. You manage the budget and oversee the physical facility. You advocate for policies and reach out to the community. In the eyes of students, teachers, parents, taxpayers, even state officials, you stand for the school. You own its successes and its failures. That is one way of thinking about high school leadership, and from it result many admirable deeds. You might, for example, follow the far-reaching recommendations of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, as spelled out in 2004 in Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for Leading High School Reform. By making innovative changes in your high school's design--such as breaking schools into smaller units, creating personal learning plans for students, or grouping students in more flexible or equitable ways--you may already be taking important steps toward transforming your high school into a real learning community. High school students, however, do not think of school in terms of its design. They come to school because they have to. They come to see their friends. They know they had better come if they want to do well in life. And if at school they find adults who acknowledge them as interesting people and help them try new things, they also come to work side by side with you and to learn the habits they will live by. The sit-in at Mr. Randolph's high school felt different to many students than it did to him, according to Eleonora, a petite 11th-grader with long dark hair. The kids knew what consequences they might suffer for their protest, in a competitive academic high school where the principal's word could make or break their futures. …
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Jan 15, 2013
David O Coddens + 1
Open Access
