It’s tough being the boss. Many people have expressed this sentiment over the years, from William Shakespeare (“Heavy is the head that wears the crown”) to Voltaire (“With great power comes great responsibility”). And yes, both of those lines have been invoked to describe the profound weight carried by Peter Parker in his lifelong solitary mission as Spider-Man.
School administrators are not superheroes, of course, but we are often expected to perform at superhuman levels. To be a great administrator, however, requires good, ongoing, and actionable feedback on your own performance and on the performance of the school in general. We all know that tracking student achievement data is important, and many of us follow demographic trends, suspension data, and budget cycles, and use other metrics to reflect on how things are going. But there are also many intangibles, like teacher morale, parent impressions of the school, and student experience, that won’t be captured in test scores but are nonetheless central to a school’s success.