Lin-Manuel Miranda’s portrayal of Founding Father and first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton highlights his scrappiness and mettle, as well as his frustration with the status quo of a then burgeoning American political system. In fact, in his 2015 interview with Atlantic writer Edward Delman, Miranda cites Ron Chernow’s official biography as the source of this approach to designing the theatrical version of Hamilton: “[Chernow] is able to keep a through-line of relentlessness that I think characterizes Hamilton as a person, and I was able to plug into that [for the musical].” Hamilton’s insatiable drive towards leaving a positive legacy on the newly formed Republic leads him also to make questionable personal and professional choices throughout his life—and the show. For example, his affair with Maria Reynolds leads to the circulation of the pamphlet of the same name that in turn tarnishes his reputation (“he’s never gon’ to be President now,” James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr sing as a refrain throughout a song (Miranda, 2015)). His neglect of his personal life and wife also serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of overworking oneself. In “Take a Break,” Hamilton disregards Eliza’s repeated invitation to “[r]un away with us for the summer / [and] go upstate,” pointing out “I lose my job if we don’t get this plan through Congress” (Miranda, 2015). Hamilton’s prioritization of work over family leads him estranged from his wife and arguably even costs him his own life.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton—both the person and the eponymous play—is rife with contradictions and competitions. So, too, is leadership: It is a bric-a-brac of perspectives that argue with one another over how best to bring about change within an institution. This cacophony of voices does not lend itself to helping individuals discern how best to serve every constituent within an organization. However, like any good composer of a musical, sometimes this discordance offers an opportunity for individuals to find their voice and sing their solos respectively. If we are to commit ourselves to sustainable and equitable change, we must be able to take our breath as needed. A choir can sing a beautiful note impossibly long because singers can individually drop out to breathe as necessary, and the note goes on. Equity-oriented leadership of any kind, at its best, can and arguably should operate like that. As independent schools become increasingly more complicated organizations, given the demands of both 21st-century society and an ever-consolidated aristocratic class within the United States, private school leaders find themselves navigating a torrent—a hurricane, even—of voices, each contradicting the other, all the while trying to find the eye of the storm for quiet. However, how a leader reconciles these contradictions and finds their own voice within the din defines not only who they are as individuals, but also, I would argue, the institution as a whole.

Consider a leader’s relationship with the faculty: an important body of people whose expectations of school leadership can range widely. Many deem their school leaders to be removed from the realities of teaching. These individuals historically have complained that their leaders—from division heads and deans, to Heads of School—do not know the intricacies of teaching because they have spent little time in the classroom. In other words, to borrow a line from Charles Dickens (2002), they “tumbled,” i.e. failed, up (p. 184). Earning the respect from this group can be challenging, as has been the case for me in my time as a leader thus far. At the same time, another group of teachers seems to wish for a complete overhaul of the status quo within their school and feel that any new administrator should burn everything down within the first 100 days and, like a phoenix, rise from the ashes of what collapsed. At their best, a leader must square the circle of the competing possibilities and visions for the institution and articulate the next direction for the school, all the while earning the trust of the teachers who see themselves as the advocates for their students.

This is no easy task, for any misstep that a leader makes can discredit them and set the organization back further. In his 2001 work The Human Side of School Change, educational consultant Dr. Rob Evans fleshes out this gray area. He cautions leaders not to make sweeping changes to an organization without first soliciting input from employees on how they will affect the lives of the teachers charged with the task of carrying out these new approaches to teaching and learning. He writes, “Many improvement schemes, rooted in the rational-structural paradigm of change, concentrate on the diagnoses of current illnesses and the prescription of ideal cures, cures that emphasize positions, policies, and procedures rather than people” (p. 91). In my time as a school leader at Barrie, I have noticed that our leadership team, like our two segments of campus, remains divided over how best to lead. Some of us prioritize introducing new protocols, overhauling the employee handbook and populating it with broad changes to policy on the most granular level. From the number of personal days faculty and staff can take, to reimbursement processes and procurements payable, to defining what the famed “other duties as assigned” actually look like, the handbook has become a de facto—almost de jure—Bible that people must consult. Some of us tend to anticipate every problem, even those of a single individual, and stipulate what The Solution™ is.

As for myself, I try to reconcile the more immediate and granular elements of leadership—the micro, such as those concerning the individual needs of people—with what I deem the mezzo and macro demands of leadership. The macro, i.e., macroscopic issues in leadership concern broader, societal forces beyond those of the institution, as well as the needs of the school itself (mezzo—“in between”). To translate into the language of Ronald Heifetz et al. (2009), I balance the view from the dance floor and that from the balcony. They term this approach “adaptive leadership,” which is “specifically about change that enables the capacity to thrive. New environments and new dreams demand new strategies and abilities, as well as the leadership to mobilize them” (p. 2). To that end, part of my responsibility as a leader is to “mobiliz[e] people to tackle tough challenges and thrive” (p. 2). This approach has not been without its share of challenges, though. For example, something I have been introducing at Barrie is anti-bias training for hiring and search committees. Moving towards this more egalitarian and fair process has taken longer than expected, for some individuals feel that they already do enough to mitigate bias in the search process. Simultaneously, they inquire as to what I do for work each day, passive-aggressively curious about my responsibilities at the school. Heifetz et al. advise that my main responsibility as a leader is “focusing on how to mobilize and sustain people through the period of risk that often comes with adaptive change, rather [than] trying to convince them of the rightness of your cause” (p. 6). Despite my vexations, I am trying not to stand on a proverbial soapbox and proselytize my ideas and pontificate at my colleagues. Instead, I need to connect the dots together and show faculty members at the school that what I do here is meant to build upon the good work happening at the school, not deride it.

Rob Evans notes another large challenge that reformists face due to this bold approach to change: “They pay little attention to the lived realities of the educators who must accomplish change or to the practical problems of institutional innovation” (p. 91). Some leaders tend to focus on the platonic ideals of Teaching and Learning; they study leadership and wax philosophic about what schools at their best should be; in fact, most of their vocabulary contains the word should. Indeed, the irony is not lost on me writing this, as I try to square my own leadership praxis within the continuum and justify my own approach with current scholarship on the subject. However, I know that I do not focus only on change in its quintessential state, because I know what Rob Evans has to say on this subject. “This blind spot,” he warns of leaders only focused on change in the abstract, “is more than just unfortunate; it is often fatal. Overlooking and underestimating the human and organizational components of change has routinely sabotaged programs to improve our schools.…If we have learned nothing else from these efforts, it should be this: [N]o innovation can succeed unless it attends to the realities of people and place” (pp. 91–92). In considering the multiple dimensions, contradictions, and multitudes of people, I must attune myself not only to the song of myself, but also those of all the people entrusted to my care. This includes the students, faculty and staff, parents and caregivers, and friends of the institution. The old adage reads that change moves at the speed of trust; nowhere is this more true than in steering my colleagues along to embracing a polyethnic, multi-perspective, democratic view of education in their practice.

And nowhere is the challenge of achieving this task more salient than in my work with the Montessori teachers within the Lower School. These individuals claim that the answer to the challenges of 21st-century students can be solved by the methods of a late 19th and early 20th century doctor. Indeed, some of Montessori’s praxis is evergreen: “Following the child,” as she calls it, is foundational to what many scholars now deem student-centered instruction. However, the Montessorians continue to cling to a prescribed curriculum that, for some, might be deemed outdated. For example, peace education as it is understood at Barrie looks like singing a song and not engaging in critical questions about world problems. Montessorian and anti-bias, anti-racist practitioner Britt Hawthorne criticizes this approach, noting that “there really needs to be expansion on the idea of peace education. What [does] the word peace [mean?]. And in our conflict resolution workshop, we—I—it's one of the very few times you'll see me quote Dr. King. But I love his definition of peace, [which] is that, it's not, like, this presence of silence, but it's really this presence of justice. Or, it's not the absence of tension but the presence of justice. That really is peace, and I think that Dr. Maria Montessori understood that herself. It's this verb: Something we're working towards” (Hawthorne 2023, qtd. in Gonzalez 2023, p. 13). My Montessorian colleagues perplex me, because I find myself inviting them into conversation, but only face resistance as a result, even though the teachers want to do better at this work towards equity and inclusion in the classroom. Central to culturally responsive school leadership, according to Muhammad Khalifa (2018), is critical self-reflection, the act of “consistently [evaluating] how they are positioned within organizations that have marginalized students; they then find ways to personally and organizationally resist this oppression” (p. 79). Instilling a practice of critical self-reflection in the Lower School bodes tough for me, because things like white fragility (DiAngelo, 2018) and white rage or resentment (Anderson, 2016) bar teachers from being honest with themselves and taking stock of their personal biases. Frankly, this problem also persists in the Middle and Upper School, albeit to a different extent. Many of my colleagues believe that because they have studied progressive education that they do not need to reflect on their practice but must warn others to catch up or be left behind.

Near the start of Hamilton (2015), Aaron Burr advises a 19-year-old Alexander Hamilton to “talk less (What?) / smile more. Don’t let them know what you're against or what you’re for.” He cautions Hamilton that boastfulness and braggadocio will be his undoing, which ultimately happens—incidentally, at Burr’s hand. In my work as a leader, I oscillate between these two things myself, discerning whether I should be more muted in telling teachers how best to do their work or more upfront. Given how sensitive some of my colleagues can be with criticisms of their practice, I struggle to decide whether a full conversation on culturally-sustaining pedagogies warrants itself. Take as an example my work with Nysear Byrd, a middle school math teacher whose own education comes from his experience at the Boys’ Latin School of Philadelphia: a classical, i.e., traditional, curriculum with teachers and mentors who look like him. Nysear is a member of a three-person mathematics department alongside seasoned teacher Roberto Villarrubi and chair Sankalp Khanna, who is leaving at the end of this school year after two years at the institution. Barrie School’s mathematics ethos is one rooted in reportedly progressive principles. However, Roberto yearns for the Barrie of yesteryear, during which most students graduated having taken calculus, while Sankalp aspires to inject liberatory, progressive pedagogy into a seemingly white supremacist curriculum. Based on my conversations with him, Nysear falls squarely between these two individuals—arguably extremes—and within the broader continuum of mathematics educators nationwide (Hess and Remillard, 2024; Berberian and Perry, 2024). That the department seems misaligned concerns me because no one can agree on how best to teach students how to think mathematically. 

However, professional development opportunities for our math team—and our whole staff—are limited due to financial constraints. Furthermore, as it stands, professional development prioritizes short-term gains over long-term sustainability, with more of these kinds of opportunities proliferating in the early 21st century (Wei and Darling-Hammond, 2010, in Darling-Hammond et al., 2017, p. 1). George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” and Obama’s “Every Student Succeeds” acts have led to a focus on “teaching to the test” hitherto unthought of, with a large demand for teachers and teaching that would result in top scores on standardized assessments—namely, tests—at various points during the school year. Of course, independent schools are not subject to testing; however, other metrics determine whether the school is a good one. For example, college matriculations serve as a proxy for the academic reputation of a school. Families consider enrollment in top-tier universities, such as members of the Ivy League or the top 20 schools according to U.S. News and World Report, an indicator for the quality education that their child(ren) received at their school. Notwithstanding perceptions of success or reputation, schools and school leaders must factor in these variables as they determine what kind of professional development to offer to their teams. To help teachers like Nysear succeed, I think moving professional development within the school towards a clinical model could bode well for my colleagues to become more informed in the work of culturally-sustaining and trauma-informed pedagogies (cf. Gordon and Espinoza, 2020; Gay, 2018; Paris, 2017). This approach, coupled with focused, sustained conversation within our school community, could boost the teaching and learning in not only math classrooms but also all classrooms within the school. 

This is why I have pushed for what is essentially a scope and sequence of professional development on a single topic for the next year, since any efforts towards building PD must be systems-based (cf. Darling-Hammond, 2017, p. 1). Jon and I have worked with our student support team, which is composed of our learning specialists and counselors, to center a series of professional development opportunities on trauma-informed pedagogy. In the process, though, my colleagues felt it necessary to bring up everything else that we need to pay attention to, telling me that we must center the needs of our most marginalized students. In “My Shot,” Hamilton asks, “Are we a nation of states? What’s the state of our nation” (Miranda, 2015)? At Barrie, we focus on the unique needs of the students in each division, but we never talk about the throughlines that unite the whole school. Our teachers end up saying that the needs of a four-year-old are different from those of a fourteen-year-old. Indeed, both statements are true; however, both of them grew up partially during a global pandemic, which many claim to be a traumatic event (cf. Kaubisch, et al., 2022). I think it behooves us all as educators to center the trauma that is the pandemic in our pedagogy, since many are witnessing COVID fallout in students’ academic performance and well-being (cf. Fahle, et al., 2023). At the same time, leaders, myself among them, also want to cultivate individual faculty’s wants and needs in their own journeys to be better educators. I know what it is like to undergo professional development that is not personally interesting, but that empowers me to create bespoke programming that benefits the entire community.

Barry Jentz (2009) discusses some of the challenges that come with adjusting to leadership. Of note, he shares that feelings of powerlessness can emerge when a new position does not bestow with it absolute autonomy: “Where you expected to get things done independently through the authority of your position, you’ll find instead that your ability to get things done depends on people outside of you unit of the organization, over whom you have no control” (p. 57). Evans builds on this observation, arguing that the toughest responsibilities of middle-management are to be given “more responsibility but no extra authority” (2024). I have found that in creating this scope and sequence, I needed to rely on the help from Jon as Head of School, CC’ing him on emails to galvanize efforts and to generate responses to join this task force. Even in planning meetings with colleagues, people defer not to me but to Jon. I attribute this problem to what I call an unsuccessful entry into Barrie. Dr. Earl Ball (2024) warns that an “unsuccessful entry can breed distrust and damage ability to build for constructive leadership” and it “can be hard to earn that trust back” from colleagues. He adds that “the period to establish leadership has been condensed by institutional and society wide anxiety.” Because Barrie is a progressive institution and is in turn more sensitive to larger societal and ethical concerns, the calendar to my entry plan did not align with the needs of the school. My more methodical, systematic approach failed to overlap with that of the school’s urgent needs, due to large amounts of turnover over the past five years and the need for more decisive leadership from above. With a new Head of School entering Barrie this July, I hope that I can get a second chance at a first impression and try my hand again at earning their trust and the political capital needed to effect positive change. Perhaps I would need to borrow from Hamilton this time and move past patiently waiting. I want to act, to create, to move the school forward. And I have to move away from Jon, who in many ways has acted like George Washington in Hamilton, and establish my own leadership and forge a path forward to build something new at Barrie.

References

• Anderson, C. (2016). White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide. Bloomsbury.

• Ball, E. (2024) “Entry into Organization.” 6 Apr. 2024, University of Pennsylvania.

• Berberian, J. and Perry, D. (2024). “Exploration of Mathematical Mindsets, Instructional Approaches, and Frameworks.” 14 Feb. 2024, University of Pennsylvania.

• Darling-Hammond, L.; Hyler, M. E.; and Gardner, M. (2017). “Effective Teacher Professional Development.” Palo Alto, CA: Learning Policy Institute. https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/sites/default/files/product-files/Effective_Teacher_Professional_Development_REPORT.pdf.

• Delman, E. (2015). “How Lin-Manuel Miranda Shapes History.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/09/lin-manuel-miranda-hamilton/408019/.

• DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press.

• Dickens, C. (2002). Great Expectations. Penguin. (Original work published 1861).

• Evans, R. (2001). The Human Side of School Change: Reform, Resistance, and the Real-Life Problems of Innovation. Jossey-Bass.

• ——— (2024). “Thinking about School Change during a Pandemic and Beyond.” 7 Jan. 2024, University of Pennsylvania.

• Fahle, M.; Kane, T.; Patterson, T.; Reardon, S. F.; Staiger, D. O.; and Stuart, E. A. (2023, May). “School District and Community Factors Associated With Learning Loss During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Education Recovery Scorecard. https://cepr.harvard.edu/sites/hwpi.harvard.edu/files/cepr/files/explaining_covid_losses_5.23.pdf. 

• Heifetz, R. A., Linsky, M., & Grashow, A. (2009). “The Theory Behind the Practice. In The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World (pp. 1-28). Harvard Business Review Press.

• Hess, B. and Remillard, J. (2024). “Issues in Math Education.” 4 Feb. 2024, University of Pennsylvania.

• Jentz, B. (2009) “First Time in a Position of Authority.” Phi Delta Kappan, 91(1), pp. 56-60.

• Kaubisch, L. T., Reck, C., von Tettenborn, A., & Woll, C. F. J. (2022). “The COVID-19 Pandemic as a Traumatic Event and the Associated Psychological Impact on Families: A Systematic Review.” Journal of Affective Disorders, 319, 27–39. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2022.08.109.

• Khalifa, M. (2018). Culturally Responsive School Leadership. Harvard Education Press.

• Miranda, L. (2015). “Aaron Burr, Sir.” On Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Atlantic Recording.

• ——— (2015). “My Shot.” On Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Atlantic Recording.

• ——— (2015). “Take a Break.” On Hamilton (Original Broadway Cast Recording). Atlantic Recording.