I am writing The Assistant Principal 50 in the second person. I am speaking directly to you. I am having a one-on-one "conversation" with you. To make the book authentic and relevant and to "bring it to life," it is replete with my personal experiences as an AP and as a principal working with APs. All of my books are short and readable because, as a former AP and principal, I know exactly how hard you work and the incredibly long hours that you put into your craft daily. Although I kept it simple to read, I implore you to treat it as a book to read and to reference throughout your assistant principalship. And when you one day become a principal, I encourage you to use it as one of the tools in your toolbox to train your APs.
I anticipate that many principals will read this book. There are some hard truths in this book for principals. When APs aren't being developed properly, you don't have to look too far to understand why. It's typically what the principal is doing or is not doing. The principal must treat the assistant principalship as an extension of the graduate school program relative to their AP's continued professional growth and development. The AP is in place to both assist the principal and to be trained to one day step into the role of principal as seamlessly as possible.
Lastly, as my goal for this book is to completely transform "the most misunderstood and underutilized position in education," I could not confine the readership to assistant principals and principals. It is my hope and intent that this book be utilized widely by aspiring assistant principals; school districts; professors and graduate school administrators in education leadership departments within and outside of the United States who prepare students for school leadership (as while educational leadership programs typically prepare students to become effective principals, in most cases, one becomes an assistant principal before becoming a principal); and district-level superintendents and assistant superintendents.
Chapter 1
The Assistant Principalship: What Is It?
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The title of this chapter is The Assistant Principalship: What Is It? I have pondered this question for the past 21 years. I have a solid grasp of what the assistant principalship is, what it isn't, and what it should never be. Because my work as a consultant takes me into hundreds of schools, I get to witness the various ways that APs are utilized, underutilized, and misutilized. This leaves me to conclude that there simply isn't a clear definition nationwide (or even statewide in any given state) of the title Assistant Principal. It is my strong belief that, toward maximizing the role of the AP, there must be a clear and consistent definition of Assistant Principal.
That is not to say that all APs must be utilized in the same manner across the United States, because different schools and districts have different needs. But when I see APs relegated to being full-time school disciplinarians, it becomes patently clear to me that there is confusion about the role of the AP, which takes me to our first question.
Q1. How do I define the assistant principalship?
When I ask you how you define the assistant principalship, I'm asking, "What does the assistant principalship mean to you?" In the Fall of 1994, I enrolled in graduate school to earn my M.A. in Education Administration to secure the position of Principal, not Assistant Principal. The graduate school courses that I took over the course of two years trained and prepared me to think as a principal. Although I was clear on the sequence of becoming an assistant principal first, quite frankly, the assistant principalship was not on my radar because it wasn't discussed in my graduate school courses. The focus of the graduate school program was the principalship. The assistant principalship didn't fully make it onto my radar until I began to apply for positions. Even in the interviews, I vividly recall thinking as a principal, although I had the correct responses for the assistant principalship. Ultimately, I landed the position of Assistant Principal at a middle school and mid-year transitioned from my 5th grade classroom to the assistant principalship. My first day as an AP was January 2, 1998.
I went into the AP position completely "blind." Having since 1988 served as an elementary teacher, my only frame of reference of an AP was the four APs under whom I served in the two schools in which I taught. They were so different from one another and none of them practiced true instructional leadership. From my standpoint, what they had in common was that they were disciplinarians. Therefore, my definition of the assistant principalship was rooted in the leadership demonstrated by those four individuals. As a result, I entered the assistant principalship without a solid model of effective AP leadership.
How do you define assistant principal leadership? What does effective assistant principal leadership look like to you? When you think of the title Assistant Principal, what thoughts does it generate? A good starting place toward effective AP leadership is a clear and consistent definition of Assistant Principal based on what the position means to you.
Q2. Is my assistant principalship all that I conceptualized it would be?
Let me answer this question for myself first: No! In fact, I would answer with an emphatic no! I have articulated and written extensively over the years that the worst experience that I had in education was my very short tenure as an AP. Although I had no clear and consistent definition of the title Assistant Principal, I developed during my tenure as an AP a definition of what an AP was not.
During my tenure as an AP, my primary responsibility was student discipline. I was a full-time disciplinarian. That consumed my entire day, rooted in the climate and culture of the school. (I typically liken discipline to a micro issue and climate/culture to a macro issue.) In my school, we were so focused on the micro via me as school disciplinarian that we completely "missed the bus" on the macro—the climate and culture of the school. Consequently, from the time students entered the building until dismissal, my days were spent reading disciplinary referrals, lecturing and counseling students who were sent to me, and making decisions relative to the consequences of the actions outlined in the disciplinary referrals. During lunch period, I served as the supervisor of the cafeteria. After lunch period, I resumed my role as disciplinarian.
I also served as the teacher supply inventory clerk. (As I write this early in the morning on my balcony in Montego Bay, Jamaica, I have a wide smile on my face. However, the smile is one of disgust—a "smh," if you will. I'm reminiscing about the system that was put in place in my school where, in my capacity as AP, I maintained the supplies and photocopy paper inventory in a storage room. Teachers sent me requisitions daily and, when I wasn't disciplining students, I pushed a cart around the school delivering supplies and copy paper to teachers' classrooms—the second of my three core responsibilities as a AP.)
My third core responsibility was bus duty. Because our district was a magnet school district, our students came in from all over the city. My job was to greet the students in the morning (a good thing), get them settled, and see them off in the afternoon (also a good thing). (I will elaborate further on each of these in Chapter 7.)
The foregoing encapsulates how my days as an AP were spent, which was a far cry from what I'd envisioned based on what I'd learned in graduate school. Although I had no clear and consistent definition of what an Assistant Principal was, I never could have imagined that it was going to be like what I'd experienced. As I have looked back on the experience over the past two decades, it continues to pain me that because of the way that my role as AP was defined, the 30 teachers that I was to have supervised received little to no supervision from me. That translated to disaster for the students because both effective and ineffective teachers were being rewarded because as the teachers' evaluator of record, I was not in position to assist teachers with professional growth and development.
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