Editor's note: ‘The vision thing’
By:
Brian Taylor
Published: November 15, 2011
A large man in work-stained coveralls was painting the hallway ceiling when I walked in the K-12 school’s front door, résumé in hand. I asked where I could find the principal.
“You just did,” he said, climbing down from the scaffold and wiping his hand carefully before thrusting it out to me as he told me his name. I recognized it and his voice from our phone conversation a couple hours earlier, when I’d called to inquire about the English-language arts teaching vacancy I’d just heard about. It was already August, and the rural school district was probably as desperate to fill the position as I, a recent college graduate who was only slowly coming to grips with The Real World, was to find one. I got the job, but I found my professional development had only just begun.
In The Real World, it turns out, principals sometimes have to do whatever it takes to keep their schools running, their teachers teaching and their children learning. Painting a ceiling ought not to be required, to say nothing of walking on water. The anatomically impossible could be a valuable asset—I’m thinking here of eyes in the back of your head—but at the least a principal must have what a politician who was eventually to be involuntarily retired once famously disparaged as “the vision thing.”
“I have a vision where the school is going, and I’m guiding that vision,” Michelle Griffith, an exemplary elementary school principal in the Redwood City School District, told frequent California Schools contributor Pamela Martineau for her story, “Principles of Good Principals."
But as Griffith would agree, that vision doesn’t originate in the principal’s office; it must reflect the intent of the school board, which in turn must conceive its vision with the active support of students, parents and staff, as retired middle school principal and former school board member Kathy Kinley—who was CSBA’s president in 2007—told Martineau.
“You need to develop a really clear vision of what you want the school to be,” Kinley advised school governance teams. “And you need to listen to the community before you formulate the vision.”
Twin Rivers Unified School District Superintendent Frank Porter shares that appreciation for a collaborative vision.
“Every school community has a unique set of teachers, staff and families,” Porter told Martineau. “You have to start by knowing what’s in place and working. You have to build rapport and trust with the team you’re working with.”
Teamwork is essential—but every team needs a captain, and that’s one of the many hats (along with the occasional painter’s cap and other assorted haberdashery)—that a principal must wear.
“I used to be principal of 45 CEOs,” Linda Solis, a principal in the Ramona Unified School District, told Martineau of how teachers used to act at her school. “They had their own parking spaces, their own vision, their own rules. The only thing they had in common was their textbooks.”
Now, as Martineau reports, Solis has instituted a dynamic, interactive workplace where teams of teachers collaborate, every department and teacher has a Web page, and weekly lesson plans are shared with students and their parents, as well as the principal, giving all involved a vision of shared learning goals. “We don’t have faculty meetings and I don’t do memos,” Solis said. I bet she would paint a hallway ceiling if she had to, though.
Just as principals may be hard to recognize in coveralls, the smartest students in a school may be going incognito, as California Schools staff writer Kristi Garrett reports in “Your Move: Gifted children shouldn’t become pawns to categorical flexibility." “Gifted children may be found in just about any classroom—a realization so profound that many districts have made it a policy to test every student to see if he or she would benefit from a gifted program,” Garrett notes.
“It’s real easy to miss the kid who is really quiet or really loud and in your face if that doesn’t fit your image of what a gifted kid is,” Teri Burns, a Natomas Unified School District board member and legislative advocate for the California Association for the Gifted, told Garrett.
At a time when budget cuts are forcing governance teams to exploit the flexibility the state has offered them in the use of categorical funds, programs for gifted students may be at risk—like some gifted students themselves.
“The thing we always hear is that these kids are really smart, they’ll do fine. We’ve got to help the struggling kids,” Burns said. “Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. If gifted kids are left to their own devices, a lot of them drop out.”
One gifted student who didn’t exactly drop out, although she never did finish high school, is Jill Wynns, CSBA’s next president. Find out how she went on to graduate from a prestigious East Coast institution of higher learning, become the San Francisco County Unified School District’s longest-serving board member and much more in my interview with her.
There’s more in this issue, including our first “Profile in Courage,” as CSBA Executive Director Vernon M. Billy promised in the Fall California Schools, and a pair of “Class Acts” focusing on science instruction.
Thanks for reading!
Brian Taylor ( btaylor@csba.org ) is the managing editor of California Schools.