Harvard Education Press

The 21st-Century Principal
Current Issues in Leadership and Policy

Edited by Milli Pierce and Deborah L. Stapleton

The 21st-Century Principal offers imaginative, thoughtful discussions of major issues confronting today's public school principals. This collection by leading thinkers in the field of education, including Richard F. Elmore, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Pedro A. Noguera, Belinda Williams, and Douglas B. Reeves, aims to provoke new thinking and inspire bold action, all with an eye toward improving public schools and the leadership abilities of those entrusted to lead them in this new millennium.

Questions the book addresses include: How will school leaders respond to changes in immigration, technology, and social policy? What effect will changing standards and demands for accountability have on their job? What impact will privatization and choice have on public schools? What challenges does the black/white achievement gap present?

As Milli Pierce notes in her introduction, 21st-century principals have to be skilled at creating strong, committed teams that can help them run their schools. "If principals are expected to do it all, we can be assured of mediocre performance, not because they aren't capable but because we have asked them to be superhuman."

Praise:

"This volume incisively portrays how the most important role in pre-college education—the principal—can lead in preparing teachers and students to meet the challenges of our 21st-century knowledge-based civilization."
—Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Contributors:

Richard F. Elmore, Chester E. Finn, Jr., Harold L. Hodgkinson, Nat LaCour, Robert J. Murphy, Gil G. Noam, Pedro A. Noguera, Gary Orfield, Douglas B. Reeves, Richard Rothstein, Marcelo M. Suarez-Orozco, Belinda Williams

About the Editors:

Milli Pierce is director of the Principals' Center at Harvard University. Deborah L. Stapleton was a 2002 Harvard University administrative fellow at the Principals' Center.