The Principal's Office

Kate Rousmaniere

Description

The Principal's Office is the first historical examination of one of the most important figures in American education. Originating as a head teacher in the nineteenth century and evolving into the role of contemporary educational leader, the school principal has played a central part in the development of American public education. A local leader who not only manages the daily needs of the school but also represents district and state officials, the school principal is the connecting hinge between classroom practice and educational policy. Kate Rousmaniere explores the cultural, economic, and political pressures that have impacted school leadership over time and considers professionalization, the experiences of women and people of color, and progressive community initiatives. She discusses the intersections between the role of the school principal with larger movements for civil rights, parental and community activism, and education reform. The school principal emerges as a dynamic character in the center of the educational enterprise, ever maneuvering between multiple constituencies, responding to technical and bureaucratic demands, and enacting different leadership strategies. By focusing on the historic development of school leadership, this book provides insights into the possibilities of school improvement for contemporary school leaders and reformers.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Go to the Principal’s Office

1.  Preceptors, Head Teachers, and Principal Teachers: School Leadership through the Late Nineteenth Century

2. The Making of the Principal’s Office, 1890–1940

3. Outside the Principal’s Office: Principals, Democratic Leadership, and Community College

4. Cracks in the System: School Leadership, 1945–1980

5. Bearing the Burden: The School Principal and Civil Rights

6. Instructional Leaders in High-Stakes Schools

Conclusion: In the Principal’s Office

Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• History of education
• Secondary school
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 17 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438448251
• Langue: English

Extrait

Frontispiece . “Administration,” from The Annual , Hamilton High School 1929 year-book, Hamilton, Ohio. Courtesy of Butler County Historical Society.

THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE
A Social History of the American School Principal
KATE ROUSMANIERE
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS

Published by S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2013 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rousmaniere, Kate, 1958-
The principal's office : a social history of the American school principal / Kate Rousmaniere.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-4823-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. School principals—United States—History. 2. Educational leadership—United States. I. Title.
LB2831.92.R68 2013
371.2'012—dc23
2012045315
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ILLUSTRATIONS
Frontispiece “Administration,” from The Annual , Hamilton High School 1929 yearbook, Hamilton, Ohio Figure 1 . “A Graphic Interpretation” Figure 2 . “The Super-Vision Demanded” Figure 3 . Brownsville, Texas Figure 4 . Mrs. Dame and Principal Dawthus Figure 5 . Woman teacher and male administrator Figure 6 . Allen Street School Figure 7 . Charlotte Hawkins Brown Figure 8 . Leonard Covello Figure 9 . Rae Logan and the faculty of Skokie Junior High School Figure 10 . Gertrude Ayer Figure 11 . School strike Figure 12 . St. Paul strike Figure 13 . L.A. principal blowout Figure 14 . Marcus Foster
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wrote this book while serving as chair of my university's Department of Educational Leadership, which, as it turned out, was the perfect setting for thinking about school principals. My department offers an excellent master's and licensure program for aspiring school principals, and my observations of those brave and energetic students, and the former school administrators who serve as their faculty, taught me more about the great possibilities of school leadership than could any library. I am especially grateful to and admiring of professors Steve Thompson, Kathy Mecoli, Larry Boggess, Ray Terrell, Michael Dantley, and Jim Burchyett, all former school administrators, who extend their commitment to progressive education by preparing future generations of school leaders. Also helpful in my thinking was my role as department chair, which is the higher education version of the principalship: a middle managerial position with fast-moving, multifaceted tasks that range from addressing long-term university policy demands to responding to immediate student and faculty needs. The work is intense, complicated, and exhausting, and for good reason is the position grimly observed as the most difficult and thankless position on campus. Yet I found the work personally rewarding and exciting, and those nine years in the chair's office gave me a closer sense of, and admiration for, the work of K-12 school principals.
The historical records of school principals are not easily identifying or accessible, and I am grateful to the guidance of staff in a number of libraries, cited in the selected bibliography at the end of this volume. Many thanks to the Albert Shanker Educational Research Fellowship, offered in conjunction with the American Federation of Teachers, which allowed me to spend three lovely winter days of research at the Walter Reuther Library, Detroit, Michigan. The staff at King Library, Miami University were exceptionally helpful as always.
Although this is a national study of American school principals, my work has been enlightened by collaborative work with international scholars who have provided new perspectives to my analysis. I send special thanks to my colleagues at the International Standing Conference for the History of Education; the national history of education societies of Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Australia-New Zealand; the Kolkata Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, India; and the editorial staff at the Journal of Educational Administration and History .
As always, many scholars and colleagues helped in the research and writing of this book. Many of those people are recognized in my notes. I also want to thank Jackie Blount, Dan Golodner, Elliott Gorn, Bob Hampel, Lauri Johnson, Judith Kafka, Craig Kridel, Catherine Lugg, and especially Wayne Urban, and my department colleagues Kathleen Knight Abowitz and Richard Quantz. The American History of Education Society has been an intellectual and professional home base for this and all of my scholarly work. Finally, none of this could have happened without John Bercaw.
This book is dedicated to the future generation, especially to my nieces and nephews. May we live and grow as our ancestors have taught us to, by choosing careers that make a difference in people's lives.
INTRODUCTION
GO TO THE PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE

This study of the history of the school principal began, literally, at the door of a principal's office. A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There's the principal's office: you only go there if you are in trouble.” As an educator and an aunt, I wondered how the office of an educational professional had come to be symbolized in such a decisive way in the mind of a child, particularly a child who had yet to enter formal schooling. As I scanned popular representations of the school principal, I found that Evie's impression was hardly unusual. Across popular and professional cultures, the figure of the school principal is commonly reduced to a small, often disagreeable functionary of bad news, the wet blanket of progressive teacher practice, the prison guard of students' freedom. As I asked friends and colleagues about their impressions of school principals, few actually knew what principals did, and many people confused the role of school building principal with school district superintendent. Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
As a historian, I was also struck by the absence of studies of the principalship. When I began this work in 2006, historians had only a sketchy understanding of the role and exhibited very little interest in understanding more. One reason for the great lacunae of historical research on the principal is that educational historians in the past fifty years tended to focus on either institutional and policy history at the central office level or on the social history of teachers, students, and communities. Principals fell through the middle, seemingly neither players in policy development nor in the day-to-day life of the classroom. Historical references to principals also tended to blur the distinction between building and central office management, collapsing the principal into a larger, indistinguishable category of bureaucratic administrator. In educational history, school principals appeared as one-dimensional functionaries, white men in dull-colored baggy suits who obediently completed administrative tasks and ordered others to be obedient to them.
The sole exception to this pattern was a pocket of historical studies on African American principals. Through the late twentieth century, black principals were completely excluded from predominantly white public schools in both the legally segregated southern United States and in the north, where virtually no African American held a principalship in any school with even a minority white population until the 1960s. In their racially segregated school systems, black principals played a critical role, serving as important role models and respected servant leaders in their communities. Historians had examined black school leaders in racially segregated schools with significantly more interest than any historians had expressed about white majority principals, and that research provided me with an insight into the possible historical significance of all school leaders.
I suspected that one reason why the history of all school principals had been largely ignored was that historians shared with others a personal predilection against school principals. In our own life history, many of us remember an inspiring teacher, but we may remember the principal only for an unfortunate, and assuredly unfair, disciplinary encounter. For women and people of color, the principal is often a position not of us, and not attainable. Personal experience is reinforced by a long cultural history of alienation between school administration and classroom teaching: Teachers who become administrators are often seen by their peers as crossing a boundary much like the river Styx—a one-way passage to a place not all that pleasant. The principal's office holds an unsavory tinge, and the people who sit in that office are viewed with some misgivings. Memory and methodology reinforce each other: when historians have written about movements for civil rights, student activism, and educational progressivism in schools, the principal has been folded into a battal