The two pictures on the cover of this excellent book go straight to the heart of its author’s argument. One is of Gertrude Ayer who, in 1940, became the first African-American principal in New York City; the other is of a class of students with a woman teacher and a male principal standing apart from them. The latter image became indicative of many American schools – a somewhat isolated male administrator running schools in which women teachers predominated; the first image illustrates the exception to the rule, especially from the mid-twentieth century – a principal who is both female and black. The frontispiece shows a white male principal sitting behind a desk strewn with documents, papers, pamphlets and books. Complete with pen, telephone and diary, this is the principal’s office indeed. A textual description (p. 97) of a Norman Rockwell painting for the cover of a popular newspaper in 1953, however, depicts an office where a young white male principal with an officious looking female secretary standing over him is bothered about a defiant, young girl with a black eye sitting outside the room. The principal’s authority might be more dubious than supposed.
Kate Rousmaniere’s searching historical analysis of “the principal’s office” – a significant title – is replete with adeptly chosen images, both pictorial and textual, from across the USA. Her subject has usually been neglected or stereotyped in the history of the evolution of American education, but she shows that, from the nineteenth century, principals increasingly became key figures in efforts to forge greater uniformity in curriculum, teaching practices and the organisation of learning. The creation of the role revolutionised the internal organisation of the school yet the principal was a middle management administrator, responsible to the district supervisor for day-to-day organisation while policies were made at district, state and, increasingly in the twentieth century, federal level.
This point is made very clearly by Rousmaniere: principals were considered crucial administrators and their load of duties steadily increased, but mostly their work consisted of implementation rather than visionary leadership. In a telling phrase, Rousmaniere says principals “stood at the bull’s eye of attention from district, state, and federal initiatives” (p. 110) while simultaneously being battered by demands from their local community and parents. By the 1970s their work was almost entirely orientated towards coping with the countless guidelines and directives they received. In turn upheld, criticised or even ridiculed as rigid disciplinarians and bureaucrats, theirs seemed a vital yet thankless role.
Yet from the late nineteenth century, as Rousmaniere depicts, the office was deliberately made the centre of a vast expansion of schooling. The professionalisation of the role meant that office-holders ostensibly became both better qualified academically and more specifically prepared than they had been previously. The creation of a separate physical office was connived at by architectural design. Rousmaniere gives several inspiring examples of African-American principals in segregated schools and progressive white principals who promoted child-centred, humanistic approaches and democratic citizenship but their attempts only added to their multifarious responsibilities and attracted both cultural and political opposition.
Throughout Rousmaniere details the gendered and racist aspects of appointments. Principals were to supervise the teachers and control the students. Building on non-factual gendered assumptions and despite, or because of, the feminisation of teaching especially at elementary level, male principals were preferred and given better chances to be qualified for the post. There were female principals – 66 per cent in elementary education, 1900-1950 – but there was a deliberate push to end this, exacerbated by anxiety about “demasculinised” students and school leaders coupled with assumptions that women themselves would prefer to work under men whose “superior executive gift” made them “‘more just, patient and sympathetic’” as school leaders” (p. 52). The aggressive drive to appoint male graduates and, especially viral athletics and sports coaches for boys, meant that the number of women principals fell drastically. This “institutionalised a career ladder that was virtually blocked for women” (p. 101).
At the same time, there was an increasing exclusion of people of colour. Racial desegregation in the south meant that many black schools closed, black teachers lost jobs and black principals were all but extinguished. Thus the significant cultural role of aspiring black educators virtually disappeared while black students in white schools were harassed daily. Rousmaniere shows examples of successful change but racial problems in education were widespread in the States and were experienced by other minority groups. Rousmaniere suggests that the key to solving conflicts were those who understood urban problems and provided improved learning.
Both racial integration and federal funding initiatives were lost, however, amidst the emphasis on educational accountability and on free market competition that became predominant in education from the 1970s. Thus principals both had to follow more rigid guidelines and were supposed to be innovative and entrepreneurial agents, driving up enrolments for their school at a time when charter schools were diverting public money into private schooling. They faced huge expectations and punishment if they did not meet them. Simultaneously they faced a challenging youth culture and greater teacher power from unionised teachers whose long fight against the deadening effect of the developing administrative hierarchy, eventually won them some gains by the late 1980s.
Rousmaniere provides a rich, complicated and dynamic history which proves her point that there is a need to revise simplistic understandings of the principals’ role. Her work, she hopes will help understanding of the work, significance and problems of contemporary principals. She believes that in the principal’s office, “principals have stood literally at the front door of educational change” (p. 152). Within itself, she argues, this office holds many of deepest questions about public education and how it can effectively meet community and national values. Readers of this well-written, well-argued book, both in America and many other countries, can profitably learn from it much about modern education.
