Before You Go to the Principal, Ask Yourself This

Having the support of your administrator matters, and it matters a lot. A hard class, difficult parent, or persistent student problem is more manageable when have the support of your administrator.

But there’s a difference in knowing you have administrative support and actually using it. And when you use administrative support, it comes with a cost that teachers often don’t think about.

In an effort to be supportive, some administrators will say things like, “If you have a problem with a student, send them to me.” Or, “If you suspect AI use, send me an email and I’ll take care of it. If a parent complains in an email, CC me in the response. I’ve got your back.”

This sounds good. But should you actually do these things?

When I was getting my teaching degree, a professor told us, “Administrators don’t want to deal with your problems.” When interviewing for teaching jobs, always emphasize that you prefer to handle things alone in your own classroom. Administrators will like that, he told us.  

While there might be some truth in this statement, it focuses on why the administrator might not want to deal with your problems. But there might also be reasons why you might not want to enlist the help of an administrator and it comes down to the nature of authority.

Once you understand authority, you will have a simple framework for deciding whether to handle an issue yourself or involve your administrator.

Why You Don't Need to Involve an Administrator

You Give Up Control

One key difference between teachers and administrators is that they have different goals, incentives, responsibilities, and authority. Teachers do not appreciate this enough. This is the least understood reason, but perhaps the most important.

For example, a parent may email you regarding the late policy in Spanish class. Your goal is to explain it clearly, maintain a good relationship with the parent, and uphold your policy. If you include your administrator, you could inadvertently introduce a host of invisible issues.

The principal may know about the student’s behavior at lunch last week, the playing time issue on the basketball team, and think about previous interactions with the parents. None of this may be relevant to the issue at hand, but once someone with this knowledge is involved, it can be included in the decision-making process. The principal also has to think about the budget, enrollment, school perceptions, fairness at a school level, and whether there is enough of a paper trail to justify decisions later.

The teacher usually doesn't have to think at this level because they work primarily with individual students and families. But the principal is accountable to the entire school community including the board and superintendent.

These differences naturally make the goals, incentives, and responsibilities different for the two. A principal can't just ask, “What seems like the right thing to do in this situation?” They also have to ask, “Can I defend this decision if a parent challenges it? Can I explain it to the board? Will other parents say we’re treating students differently? Does this create a precedent I’m willing to uphold?”

Administrators have more people to answer to, more information to consider, more risk to manage, and more decisions that may need to be justified later. The position naturally creates more defensive decision making. Teachers don’t have to think this way, at least not at this kind of scale.

What a principal decides about Spanish class may not be a bad decision, but it may not be the decision the teacher would have made, given that they are only responsible for their classroom. And that's the problem with automatically bringing an administrator into a situation: you’re introducing someone whose decision-making process is very different from your own.

If the teacher and the administrator have different goals, the administrator’s goals may win out because they have more authority.

Here’s another example to illustrate the point. Let’s say a teacher confronts a student and explains that there are several writing procedures put in place to ensure students are not using AI. The student didn’t follow any of these procedures. The student will not receive credit.

The student swears they didn’t use AI. You simply reiterate that they will receive a zero because they didn’t follow the procedures that students must follow when writing papers.

If you decide to include an administrator, they could say, “I hear you and want to support you in this. So did they actually use AI?”

What was about writing procedures has now become about proving or disproving the use of AI, a much muddier issue.

AI is an interesting example because it requires a paradigm shift in how we think about academic honesty. You often can’t prove AI conclusively, but a teacher may be comfortable making a decision based on a collection of evidence rather than definitive proof. An administrator may have a harder time making this shift, and it makes sense given their role. A teacher is making a choice for their classroom, but the administrator needs to think at a school level.

If a parent challenges the decision, the administrator may need to be able to explain why the school concluded that a student used AI. That can lead to a very different question: “What can we do to prove it?”

Now the responsibility for proof is on the teacher’s shoulders and this could result in hours of more work.

Again, administrators typically aren’t trying to be difficult. They may genuinely want to help and may see the additional work as protecting the teacher, but the teacher has now lost control of the problem and is being directed to prove something that often can’t actually be proven.

What began as an issue of writing procedures has become a much more time-consuming attempt to prove AI use. This is a good example of how involving someone with different responsibilities can change not only the solution to a problem, but the definition of the problem itself.

In both of the above examples, the administrator isn’t doing anything wrong. They are trying to help. They are involving their prior knowledge about the student or family, things you may not be privy too. They are asking questions.

But once you involve an administrator, you lose some control over how the problem is dealt with. In fact, you lose the ability to define what the problem even is.

Involving another teacher is very different. When asking a colleague for advice, they can share their experience and give recommendations, but you remain in control and responsible for how you handle the situation. They don’t have the power to direct what you do or to step in and communicate to a parent on your behalf.

Administrators, on the other hand, have the authority, and sometimes even the responsibility, to intervene in ways that put you out of control and can even sideline your goals. When including someone with power, you aren’t just adding another voice to the conversation. You’re adding a voice that speaks at a different volume from your own. This is why “just CC your administrator” isn’t a neutral act. It shifts the power dynamics of the conversation.

You Undermine Your Credibility

When involving an administrator, you are relying on their authority instead of exercising your own. When you repeatedly do this for problems you could handle on your own, you undermine your own authority and credibility.

My professor’s advice was blunt in saying that administrators don’t want to deal with your problems, but he’s partly right. Every time you refer your problem to your administrator, you make it their problem too. This can only happen so many times before an administrator starts to take notice. It’s one thing to tell your administrator, “I’ve exchanged several emails with a parent and met with them regarding a classroom policy, but we aren’t making progress. Would you mind helping?” But it’s a different thing to say, “A student keeps blurting out in class. Can I send them to you next time they blurt out?” The first sounds like professional judgment, the second dependence.

The students also take notice. If student behaviors are always referred to the principal, it begins to look like you can’t, or don’t know how to, deal with your own problems. It undercuts the teacher’s authority and credibility in the eyes of the students. In fact, it can even cut into your own confidence.

When you handle your own problems, you build confidence in yourself, and students and administrators will have more confidence in you too.

You Create More Work

Handling things by yourself saves you time because teachers and administrators have different responsibilities.  

A teacher is close to the problem. You may have seen the problem yourself, know the student, situation, context, classroom policies and procedures and assignments, and have enough evidence to make a reasonable decision. If a student objects, you can explain the policy and the consequence and get back to teaching. You don’t necessarily need to document every detail or consider how you would defend this decision to the board.

An administrator has a different responsibility. The teacher is concerned with handling the issue, but the administrator is concerned with the way the issue is handled. Once an administrator is involved, they may need more documentation and proof. They may need to understand how your class operates, what your policies are, how assignments are structured, how your grading works, and what communication has already taken place. They may need to consider how this relates to other policies, how this affects other students, need to check on precedents and student history, and think about how to justify this decision to the board if necessary.

This can take time. Teachers can often act fairly quickly. Administrators often need to slow the process down.

The administrator isn’t doing anything wrong, nor are they trying to be inefficient. They simply have different responsibilities. A teacher can often handle a problem in a fairly quick and easy way, while administrators may need to take the problem through a more formal process.

Involving an administrator seems like a good idea because we are keeping our boss in the loop, but oftentimes, they want us to use our teacher judgment and authority to make decisions. It can also seem like a relief, because, for a moment, we have relieved ourselves from the responsibility of making decisions. But this relief comes with a cost.

Once you’ve handed the issue off, you may think you don’t need to make any more decisions, but you’ve only pushed the problem into a process that your principal may now be directing. Your principal may now need you to provide policies, assignments, student history, emails, documentation, and other information to resolve the issue. They may need proof where you didn’t. What seemed like a way to save yourself time can end up requiring hours more.

Why You Should Involve an Administrator

You Need Authority You Don't Have

When thinking through all the various situations where you might include your principal, it really is this simple.

The simple question you can ask of any problem is this:

Does this problem require someone with more authority?

This question lets you simply and quickly understand if you need an administrator or not.

If you’re having trouble with a student blurting out in class or using the bathroom too much, ask a teacher. If you’re having trouble connecting with a student or need a better prompt for an essay, ask a teacher. If you’ve crafted an email response to an angry parent and want to know if your tone is okay, ask a teacher. Teachers have skills and experience that are often what you need. You don’t need any more authority than what you already have as a teacher. 

If, however, you’ve communicated with a parent six times already and they don’t seem to understand your policy and are growing more antagonistic, you may need more authority. You may need your principal to step in if the parent doesn’t seem to respect your authority on the issue.

If a parent goes over your head to the principal, the issue has moved beyond your authority and you can let your principal handle the issue.

Teachers are good at teaching and dealing with classroom issues. Administrators are good at looking at the whole system and exercising their authority to protect the integrity of that system.

Know what you need, and know where to go. You’ll get better at solving problems, and save yourself some time.