Would you like to be a school principal?  I sure wouldn't!  In my opinion, it is a mostly thankless job.  Becoming a school principal is a necessary step if your intention is to climb higher in the field of education and become a superintendant or district administrator but becoming a school principal for the sake of a change or thinking you can impact children should be a well thought out decision.

    Here are my observations about the job of principal:

 TOOTHLESS TIGER:  Especially in public schools, the principal is not really the "boss", the contract between the teachers and the district is the "boss" and it's the principal's job to see that the teachers are sticking to the contract.  It is when the principal attempts to interpret the contract that things can get sticky.  For example, in my district in Santa Monica, Ca our contract states that teachers are to dress "professionally" but does not define what "professional dress" entails.  Any principal who attempts to enforce this by making teachers where ties, long dresses or even closed toed shoes could be heading into quite a battle.  Therefore, most principals do not enforce dress codes.

Principals at private schools may have the power to fire teachers at will and without cause but that does not necessarily make their job any easier.  Public school parents would find it very difficult to have a principal removed if the superintendant did not agree with their concerns but at a private school it is the parents who are flipping the bill and cannot be ignored as easily. 

THE PAY:  While the prinicpal's pay is higher than most teachers, when you consider how many more hours they work (including all of August), teachers make more money per hour than most principals.

THE WORK:  A great deal of the principal's time is spent in meetings that may not be a valuable use of time but due to regulations the principal is obligated to be there. IEP's (Individual Education Plans) are typically reserved for special education students and these meetings take up a tremendous amount of a principal's time and it is not the principal doing most of the speaking, it's the special ed team.

 This is one area where private schools have a significant leg up on public schools.  They are not bound to these contractual obligations.  Not to mention, most special ed children do not make it into private schools for just that reason.

DEAD WEIGHT:  Many principal's, due to their lofty aspirations, do not stay at a school for very long.  So when they are faced with dealing with a tenured teacher they may not bother dealing with the situation since it takes so much time and effort to have a tenured teacher removed from their post.  This is where the principal can feel truly powerless.  Like I have said in other blog entries, "How can you expect a school to be great when you can't fire someone for not being great?"

 THE POLITICS:  Once you become a principal you are officially a politician.  You better be prepared to have to make decisions that are going to leave a lot of people very angry at you but unlike most politicians who never see their constituents, you have to walk the halls among them everyday!  You may also be torn between what is best for the district and what is best for your school.  Our school suffers from overcrowding and the principal has to fight to keep our school at a reasonable size every year but it is the district who she works for and serves so she is always in a very tough spot every August. 

I have seen some incredible principals during my time teaching.  They can truly set the tone of the entire campus, if they are happy to be there and love their job, that feeling is contagious.  I wish that principals had more power on campus and were not as handcuffed by the union contracts as they are.  There have been plenty of instances of "lemon" principals but that does not mean you should strip them of all their power.