Listening to the pleas of parents, he helped Fairhill to add seventh and eighth grades; more than a third of his recent eighth-grade grads went on to high-achievement magnet schools. He has no teacher vacancies because his teachers are loathe to leave.
"I've landed in a place that to me is like heaven," Koch, 50, says.
Alas, as yet another school year begins, America has a shortage of good principals like Edward Koch.
In fact, it has a shortage of folks who would even for a moment consider taking a principal's job. Half of all districts nationwide report a dearth of qualified candidates.
The principal shortage is also expected to intensify as baby boomer retirements further erode the ranks.
That's why it is urgent business for school districts and state legislatures to develop innovative and practical ways to find more good principals, in places obvious and not so obvious, and help them persevere on the job.
Even the good ones need support, because the principal's job, always tough, has become Herculean.
Imagine a job that regularly requires working from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. weekdays, with weekend work piled on, too. Imagine a head-spinning number of problems: Falling grades, lack of money, teacher vacancies, missing janitors, leaky roofs, knife-carrying kids, pushy parents, absent parents. In private industry, about seven people on average report directly to any one boss. For school principals, it can easily be 30 or 40.
"In an average day you can go from a probation hearing to an angry parent who's worried about a grade their kid got to a discipline proceeding to testimony at a criminal trial," said Marc S. Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. "It has very little to do with instruction," Tucker adds.
Yet, increasingly, the principal's job is on the line if schools fail to achieve new testing standards set by federal No Child Left Behind legislation.
