Young Principals as Rock Stars

Viviana Pyle in the KIPP human resources department surveyed all 45 KIPP principals around the country for me and found that their average age was 32. Two-thirds of them were recruited from the ranks of the Teach For America program, which places young teachers in low-income neighborhood schools with only a summer of training right after they graduate from college. Each KIPP principal goes through a year-long training program funded by GAP clothing store founders Doris and Don Fisher and federal grants. It includes classes in business management at the University of California at Berkeley and work in other KIPP schools, or schools similar to KIPP in their emphasis on raising achievement for low-income, inner-city kids.

Since Winston first visited Levin's school in 1997, she has become his guardian angel in navigating the rough currents of the New York City school bureaucracy. She had created her own successful public middle school in the early 1990s, raising achievement for Harlem students through a program in which they wrote, published and sold their own books, and so she knew the pitfalls of success. She is retired now and works as a consultant for KIPP. She does for the new crop of principals what she did for Levin. She gives advice and keeps spirits up. Her morale-boosting techniques include bringing Runyan-Shefa coffee at crucial moments and listening with an understanding smile over a steak dinner at a Columbus Avenue restaurant as the three male principals, plus Levin, complain in vivid terms about what their long hours are doing to their personal lives.

The largest KIPP schools have no more than 320 students, just the right size, it seems to me, for a young principal with desire and determination. Most urban schools are much bigger than that, which forces the principal to spend nearly all of his or her time dealing with adults, rather than students. The job becomes very political, and age and experience become more important.

If the Gateses, the Fishers and other educational entrepreneurs succeed in their efforts to create a new era of small schools, then many more principals will be needed, and the good young ones will be in demand.

Winston said she is not sure how long her young clients can keep up their current pace. Young people of talent are drawn to KIPP principalships, but like professional athletes or rock stars or theoretical physicists, there may be a limit to how long they can stay on the top of their game. Winston said she thought after six years or so they might need a different kind of job.

"They have no personal life," she said. "But they learn so much and get so much done early that the future for them is very, very bright. And they get a certain amount of the need to give out of their system."

I asked why it was good to shed some of that need to give. "Because giving too much can be as unhealthy as not giving at all. It is an excuse. It is sometimes easier to give than it is to take. You have to ask yourself: why am I not taking, how do I feel about me, what does that say about me?" she said.

Eventually, Winston said, the young principals need to find a balance in their lives so they don't become bitter about what they are missing. Much of their power as educators comes from showing their students how much they love what they are doing. "It will never serve to have people in these positions who don't like themselves," Winston said.