Redesigning the Role of the Principal: Mobilizing and Organizing the Field to Lead for Racial Equity

Abstract

The mission of the Education and Society Program (ESP) Team at the Aspen Institute is to improve public education by informing, influencing, and inspiring education leaders across policy and practice, with an emphasis on achieving equity for students of color and students from low-income families. In December 2019, ESP submitted a grant proposal to fund a learning agenda entitled “Evolving the Role of the Principal.” The purpose of this learning agenda at conception was to increase the sustainability of the role by: clarifying what a principal can uniquely accomplish; identifying leadership responsibilities that can be distributed to empower teachers and others; and exploring the research base, promising practices, and political context surrounding the evolving role of the principal. A few months after submission, ESP was awarded the grant; however, no one knew that a public health pandemic and a racial reckoning were on the way, which would force the field to transform the role of the principal yet again.

My residency, based on the ESP Team, involved leading the “Evolving the Role of the Principal” learning agenda as my strategic project. This capstone examines the social history of the principal role, change management, and mobilizing and organizing practices for change, all in service to discover what it would mean for the role of the principal and district systems to lead for racial equity. I describe my work in three phases: redefining the problem through an equity lens, building a guiding coalition to reconceptualize the role, and experimenting with mobilizing and organizing practices. Through my analysis of the progress made and not yet made to date, I explore the organizational change required to center racial equity and offer implications for the site, sector, and myself.