Timeout for Leadership-your one-minute leadership idea

Message from the Lead Dog Principal #3

Can you survive your knuckleheads?

Let’s face it.  Every school or organization has its share of knuckleheads.  They may impact you from within or maybe they impact you by circling around the periphery.

I was motivated to write this blog this week after reading what SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell had to say about her company in a recent speech.  She said that her company has a ‘no a**hole’ policy.  She goes on to say that, “these kinds of people-a**holes-interrupt others, they shut down or co-opt conversation, and they create a hostile work environment where no one wants to contribute.”

Reading the text of her speech, given at the commencement of Northwestern University made me think of the ‘a**holes’ that significantly impacted the success of my school.  Even though I knew that I had my share of these folks within the school and system, today I am compelled to talk about the “knuckleheads” that operated on the outside of my school.

As the principal and ultimately the superintendent of an urban school, I always believed that we had to contend with a “white flight” phenomenon.  I think everyone knows what I am talking about.  I continually felt that we lost many students simply based upon the racist’s tenets of the “white flight” principle.  This changed one day as I was arriving for work and I passed probably twelve of my former African American students dressed in their Catholic School uniforms heading off to a local parochial high school. 

This was a defining moment for me.  As I paused at the corner, I waved at some of the kids and made my way to work where I sat in my car in the parking lot for more than several minutes while this epiphany settled it.  You see, I was not only losing white students, I was also losing students of color.  It was then that I realized that this was not “white flight,” it was “bright flight.”  Parents of all students, regardless of their ethnicity wanted their children to attend a school free of “knuckleheads.”  And unfortunately, these parents perceived that my high school was full of knuckleheads or what Gwynne Shotwell might call a**holes.

I did not think that the parents’ perceptions were necessarily accurate but I could understand in part where they came from.  You see, upon dismissal, groups of disaffected and disconnected young adults in the 18–22-year-old age group would congregate and loiter around the school.  Although they were not permitted on school property their presence around the school was obvious.  Unfortunately, the local police did not help me in this regard.  Parents did not want to send their children to my school where they felt these young adults attended.  I got it.  I didn’t blame them.

To solve this problem, I had to diligently work with the police to motivate them to help move these “knuckleheads” away from the school.  More importantly, I realized that I had to ratchet up my marketing campaign and prove to the community that my school was not about these vagabond young adults.  There were plenty of wonderfully bright and committed students attending my school, many of whom were going on to college and in fact going to some of the best universities in America.  Marketing became a key priority for our future.  If we were to thrive, we had to keep these students from escaping our school district. We had to keep them home, where I felt they belonged.  It was a difficult process but I think we started to yield some results.

So, for me, my quest was not necessarily to defeat “white flight,” for I thought unfortunately because of human nature some of that would always exist.  I had to stop the “bright flight” drain on my school.  That was controllable.  Therefore, focus on and do something about the things that you actually can control.

“Bright flight” can be defeated!  And along the way, in this world of the “survival of the fittest,” your work might just save your school.