Sunday’s Boston Globe ran a detailed article about the departure of English High School Headmaster Sito Narcisse. The piece made a few key points. Due to his heavy-handed style of leadership over the last few years, 75% of administrators and staff have left, either voluntarily or not. The school has endured a series of top-down changes-du-jour under his watch: single sex classrooms, elimination of the grade “D”, a mandatory uniform policy that was mandatory before it was not mandatory, single-grade floors, rewards programs that started and were aborted. The school is now teetering on state takeover.

“State education officials are so concerned about the lack of improvement under Narcisse that they are withholding more than $900,000 in federal funds until the school comes up with a better plan to fix its problems. If that fails, one of the oldest public high schools in the United States could face state takeover as early as next year.” (Globe)

According to the article, the dropout rate is up, the student failure rate is up, and so on. The article is very compelling and detailed, and worth a look. What is significant here is that under the last two administrative regimes as English High School each principal has had unlimited power and authority — and still the school has suffered.

The previous headmaster had complete authority to remove staff under what was called Commonwealth Pilot Status. The aforementioned Mr. Narcisse enjoyed the identical authority under what is called Turnaround Status. It might be fair after these two experiments to conclude that giving someone unlimited power and authority to manage a school may not be a recipe — in and of itself — for school improvement and success. It may also be fair to conclude that good schools run under shared leadership, common buy-in and mutual respect, all of which have been lacking at English High School.