I was at a school a couple of years ago doing my “Dealing with Difficult Parents” workshop when a teacher presented a case of an extraordinarily difficult set of parents: very famous people, extremely wealthy, and big contributors to the school. These were parents who followed their son and daughter’s school careers with a microscope, tracking every test grade, every up and every down, no matter how small. They had been highly and publicly critical of their children’s teachers in the past and continued the pattern with their children’s current teachers, including the teacher who was describing them to me. They had publicly declared, by name, that certain teachers in the school should be fired. Because of their influence, they were soon surrounded by a posse of other parents who repeated their words.
From my point of view, this was a dangerous situation, perhaps just about the most extreme kind of “difficult parents” that a school has to manage.
When the teacher asked what she should be doing, I told her that there was almost nothing she could do. Indeed, she needed the highest form of protection the school could offer. I told her that only the head of school — the sheriff, so to speak — could take on a set of parents like this.
After I declared that the head must intervene with these parents, there was a long and painful silence in the room. People either looked away or down at their feet. It didn’t take a psychologist to figure out what the faculty was thinking:
Our head doesn’t have the guts to deal with this family.
I have described one consultative moment, but in fact there have been numerous moments in my career that have come to this painful impasse. Happily, there have been many more moments that have gone the other way. In these meetings — when all the teachers looked sick with fear and helplessness in the face of a threatening family, and I declared, “This is one the head of school must handle” — everyone suddenly looked relieved. “We’re going to be all right,” the collective body language told me. “Our head of school is up to this task. We have a courageous head of school.”
In my experience, not all faculties are accurate in their assessment of their head of school. Some underestimate their head’s bravery; others overestimate it. But make no mistake about it, all teachers evaluate their heads of school on the criterion of courage — and so do I, much more than I used to.
I don’t think of myself as particularly courageous. Indeed, I am cautious and often made anxious about challenges. However, watching schools in difficulty has made me increasingly aware that courageous heads succeed in leading the school through the difficult times, and cowardly heads do not. The long-term heads I know have all grown in courage over the years — slowly, quietly, but unmistakably.
What Is Courage?
The best definition I know of “courage,” and how to acquire it, belongs to Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.”
“Looking fear in the face” and doing “the thing which you think you cannot do” is exactly what school heads have to do over and over. Sooner or later, all of those who occupy the head’s chair will face that moment when they have to do the thing that they do not think they can do.
Let me give you just one example. About eight years ago, I drove to a school on a warm June day to give the commencement address. When I arrived at the head’s office an hour before graduation was supposed to begin, he was just returning to his office from the boys’ dorm where he had broken the news to a 14-year-old boy that his father had died early that morning. “Why didn’t the mother tell him?” I asked.
“Well, they are divorced,” he said, “She wasn’t at the hospital. She is driving up from New Jersey to be with him. She will be here in two hours.”
“You didn’t have to tell him,” I observed. “You could have waited for the mother to tell him.”
“Well, yes,” he said, “But the mother asked me to tell him. She said she wanted me to tell him.”
It was not something he had done before, but I did not sense that the head had hesitated much at all. For a moment, he probably doubted that he could do it. Five minutes later, he was getting a trusted faculty member to look after the boy, then he made me comfortable, and a few minutes later he opened up a commencement ceremony with confidence and conviction.
This head’s willingness to step into the breach and do a mother’s job leads me to the first of my five kinds of courage I see in effective heads of school.
PROTECTIVE COURAGE: The Courage of the Mother
Mothers are rightly known for their powerful instinctive courage on behalf of their children. In the natural world, they will do almost anything — sometimes irrational things — to keep their children from being hurt or to rescue them if they are threatened.
The head of an international school in Jerusalem told me that, a number of years ago, a suicide bomber detonated a bomb three streets away from his school just after it had let out for the day. Everyone who was still in the school building felt and heard the explosion. Everyone suspected what it was and were rightly afraid of a second explosion or at least the sight of the carnage. Without thinking — or should I say, thinking with a mother’s courage — the head told people to stay in the courtyard, and then he ran down the street to see if any of his students or families had been hit by the bomb. He ran down a street filled with blood, bodies, and body parts checking to see if he recognized any of the victims.
He couldn’t find any of his children or their parents among the victims — no one in his community was killed — but he overcame his natural fear in a second in order to go looking. When he told me the story years later, he denied being brave.
Last year, at the Academy of International Heads summer seminar, I asked Rose Puffer, a petite woman and the head of the international school in Islamabad, Pakistan, whether she thought of herself as brave to lead a school that has been the avowed target of Islamic terrorists. I only asked her the question after hearing that she has under her control eight armed guards in two vehicles that circle the school all day. “No,” she said to me, “It isn’t brave. I have worked in the school for many years. It’s a wonderful school and the community really needs the school.” In other words,
they are my children; they need me.
No one pursues a graduate degree in education imagining that they will be protecting their community from terrorists, but I have heard more than a few such stories from international heads. I also know stories of courage in the face of homegrown criminals.
I knew a head who was presented with some photographic evidence that a teacher might be a pedophile. Though it was equivocal, it was enough for her to have security escort the teacher off campus and call the police.
The local police were extremely slow to respond to the crime and the suspect got away. Without a suspect, the police were not in hurry to search for further evidence. It was the head who, in frustration, went through all of the teacher’s personal materials and found extensive evidence that he was pedophile who had both photographed and molested boys from his class. A painful and terrible job, no doubt, for a head of school who must have felt responsible for the crimes committed against her children.
LONG-DISTANCE COURAGE: The Courage of the Mountaineer
Ferocious protective courage isn’t the only type of courage I see in heads of school. There is a kind of forward-looking courage that involves vision, planning, and the constant risk of failure.
Anyone who decides to climb Mt. Everest knows how difficult it is, how many people fail, how many people die on the mountain. Even in the successful climbs, there are constant setbacks along the way. One’s life is always in danger. It is perhaps presumptuous to compare climbing Everest with a major capital campaign or building a school from the ground up, but when I hear heads of school talking about raising $20 or $30 or $50 million, I always see a tall mountain in my mind.
What I know from talking to heads who are successful at raising money is that, as much as they appreciate the generosity of wealthy people, in any capital campaign they will have to face arrogance, game-playing, and rejection of a kind that most of us would have a hard time tolerating. As he left for Florida to visit a fabulously wealthy alum of the school, a head told me that he suspected that the man would spend the time during their visit boasting about his accomplishments, criticizing the school, and would ultimately give the school a gift of $10,000, when he could easily give millions.
Why did the head fly to Florida to waste his time and be abused? Well, he had a very big mountain to climb and he had to ask for all the help he could get. But make no mistake, it feels bad to get rejected in that way, and it takes courage to go back for more. Heads of school have to go back again and again and again; they have to put themselves out there. Heads who can’t do it fail to raise money, and they are unable to advance their schools.
Arguably, it takes even more courage to make a fundamental change to the culture of a school and face the fury of a veteran faculty determined to maintain the status quo. Years ago, I had the privilege of helping a young head at a K–12 girls’ school in Pennsylvania reorganize and revitalize her school. When she had the temerity to challenge the longstanding tradition that only upper school teachers could be department chairs by appointing a middle school teacher as chair of the math department (“She doesn’t teach calculus!”), she set off a huge battle of wills. I came in to run a faculty discussion on school culture and saw all of the department chairs sitting together in the corner glaring with their arms crossed. Talk about “mean girls”! The department chairs wouldn’t talk, didn’t participate, and wouldn’t cooperate. I was happy to get out of town. The head had to face them every morning, smiling without gritting her teeth, constantly offering the hand of friendship, not knowing how long the war would last.
I talked with John Gulla, the head of the Blake School (Minnesota) about his decision to bring merit pay for teachers to his school. The first merit pay checks, worth from 5 to 20 percent of one’s annual salary, went out to some faculty members in June of 2010. It took John eight years of debate to revamp the teacher evaluation program in preparation for this huge step. When I asked him whether instituting such a change required courage, he said, “Yes, and I have the knife wounds in my back to prove it.”
ALONE ON STAGE: The Courage of the Pitcher or the Stand-up Comedian
Perhaps the toughest situation is when a head makes a decision that he or she cannot explain in public, when he or she is out there all alone. You may not have your best stuff, you may be dying in front of the audience, but you have to keep pitching; you have to keep doing your routine.
The two most obvious situations in which a head finds herself completely isolated and misunderstood is when she has fired a teacher and cannot talk about it due to employment privacy laws or when she has either dismissed or kept a student in the face of public opinion that all goes the other way. I wish I could tell you the name of a female head of an international school who faced down a really disturbed, threatening male teacher who happened to be the head of the teacher’s union. The head then had to live two more years with the man’s wife, a member of the faculty and a competent teacher, savaging her behind her back.
A long-time head, who retired this past June from an East Coast day school, used to come to the Institute for New Heads and tell a story about firing a dishonest basketball coach at his previous school. The man absolutely deserved to be fired on several counts, not least because he explicitly encouraged two girls to slander a colleague he didn’t like by spreading gossip that his colleague had had inappropriate sexual relationships with girls. The girls confessed the plot to the head of school, who immediately fired the basketball coach for immoral attempts to destroy a colleague’s career. The only problem was this: the basketball coach had taken the girls’ team to the state championships the previous year and was in the process of taking his current girls’ varsity team to another championship. You can imagine that the decision to fire the coach was not well received by the students or the parents, especially because employment privacy law prevented the head from explaining why he had fired the man.
At graduation that spring, the father of one of the girl basketball players came to the ceremony and passed out baseball hats with the initials of the fired coach sewed on them. The head was forced to conduct the entire graduation looking out at a crowd where both students and parents were wearing hundreds of the hats.
The head of a small school in a small town in Virginia believed that, because his school was the only independent option in the town and the region, it was the school’s responsibility to take a broader range of students than another independent school might. But when he decided to keep a wildly restless, extremely impulsive and occasionally aggressive kindergarten boy, the parent body rose up against him. Obviously, this boy was a danger; surely this boy was destroying the learning environment for their children. The moms in the parking lot were in agreement, but the head stood firm. He said he would rather pay for a full-time aide to monitor the child than let the parent body run the boy out of school. The boy did not immediately get his behavior under control and ultimately he had to hire that aide — at the school’s expense. He had to endure a year of almost constant criticism and gossip. It was a lonely year for him, but he kept on going on.
DELIBERATIVE COURAGE: The Courage of Judge, Jury, and… Executioner
Heads make decisions that alter the courses of lives, take people out of professions they love — but at which they are not very good — and separate people from their colleagues and friends of decades. None of these decisions are ever taken lightly; every head thinks about the impact on a person’s life.
Firing teachers takes conviction and will; firing administrators with whom you work every day takes deep courage. Occasionally, when I go to a school in the fall, the head tells me that, for one reason or another, he or she has to fire an administrator, but hasn’t done so yet. He or she will do it by Christmas, to give the person a chance to get another job, and will write the letter of recommendation for the person.
Those who consult with schools absolutely understand why a head needs to tell us about their decision-making process and the upcoming confrontation. A decision like that is never impulsive. It is complex and painful and takes months, sometimes a couple of years, to make — and it takes months to live through. Once made, the head has to live in close working proximity with the administrator, must try to get the best out of him or her; they have to work together to prepare for the future of the school, with the head knowing that the administrator won’t be part of that future. Effective heads do this; ineffective heads do not.
Many years ago, in the first school for which I worked, the head of school kept a truly incompetent upper school director in his job, even though it was obvious to everyone that this man was holding the school back. The head told me he should have fired him when he first came onto the job, but he hadn’t and now, he speculated, the community couldn’t handle the loss. It would be too disruptive. As a novice consultant, I initially accepted this as headmasterly wisdom. What it was, in fact, was a rationalization for the head’s lack of courage; he never made the hard calls; his fear permeated the school.
COURAGE IN THE FACE OF PAIN: The Courage of the EMT
If heads sometimes have to display a slow-going courage, they must also react quickly to many terrible and unexpected events: the accidental death of a high school student in a car accident, the suicide of a teenager, the impending death of a second-grader from an inoperable heart defect that could fell him at any moment, the sudden death or fatal illness of a teacher. I have been at schools where a teacher has died of a stroke while driving a van full of fifth-graders — her last living act was to pull it off onto the right shoulder — and I have been at a school where a teacher dying of cancer has wanted to teach as long as humanly possible. In all of these cases, the community looks to the head to model courage. In the case of the second-grader at risk for imminent death from a heart defect, it was the head of school who made the decision that she — and therefore we — had the courage to keep the boy in school even though it was likely that he would die suddenly on the playground or in the classroom.
Then there are the unexpected and weird conversations: confronting a young male faculty member with evidence that he is downloading porn during breaks in the school day, talking to an older faculty member who has been revealed to have a porn addiction.
I sat in the office of a head of school once who had to call one of her board members to inform her that her husband’s affair with another board member was that day being openly gossiped about in the school. Not a call she wanted to make.
Psychologist Rob Evans, my colleague and friend, has a talk he gives to heads called, “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up.” He gives a version it every year at the summer Institute for Experienced Heads that we run for the Southern Association of Independent Schools. Why? Because heads need to hear each other’s stories. They need to laugh. They need to feel that their colleagues have faced the same fears and had to call up the same kind of inner courage to manage the situation. Sometimes they need to have the door closed tightly so they can describe a situation to their colleagues and say, “I was so scared, I didn’t sleep for days. I didn’t think I had the fortitude to handle it and I don’t know how I found the courage.”
And sometimes they come to tell their peers in private, “I’ve loved my job. I respect what you do. But I just don’t have the stamina to keep doing this. I’m leaving.” They need to hear their peers say, “It’s all right. We understand. You can put down your sword, Xena. You can take off the cape, Superman. We’ve all had the impulse to leave this job, because it just takes so much ordinary courage.”