Called to Lead — In Times Like These

What I Learned in a Principal's Office About the Courage This Moment Demands

I spent years walking into schools before the first bell — when the hallways were still quiet and the day hadn't yet made its demands. In those early morning moments, I learned something that no leadership manual ever quite captured: that the hardest part of leading a school isn't the curriculum, the data, or even the budget. It's the courage to do the right thing when everything around you is telling you to stay quiet.

We are in one of those moments now. And it is asking everything of school leaders.

The Storm Outside the Schoolhouse Door

The pressures bearing down on American education right now are not abstract policy debates. They are landing on real kids, in real classrooms, in real schools — including schools in the Shenandoah Valley, and in every corner of this country.

The federal Office for Civil Rights, the office that exists to ensure every student is protected from discrimination, has seen 90% of its staff eliminated. Thirty thousand civil rights complaints sit in limbo. Research funding has been gutted — meaning we are flying blind on questions like: What is social media doing to our kids? What is working in AI-assisted learning? What do children with disabilities actually need right now?

Meanwhile, educators are watching in real time as the language of equity — the very language that helped them reach their most vulnerable students — is treated as something to be erased. Teachers in districts across America are self-censoring, not because the law has changed, but because the climate has. Because the chilling effect is real.

The literacy crisis is not a policy problem. It is a human problem. And human problems require leaders who are willing to be human — which means being honest, being present, and yes, being courageous.

Only 30% of eighth graders in America are reading proficiently. The students who were in kindergarten during the worst of the pandemic are now sitting in middle school classrooms — and many of them are still carrying that lost time in their bones. This is the inheritance that school leaders have been handed.

What Courage Actually Looks Like in a School Building

I want to be careful here, because "courage" in leadership can sound like a trumpet call — dramatic, loud, singular. But the courage I witnessed in the best principals I ever knew, and the courage I tried to embody myself, looked much quieter than that.

It looked like a principal who called a parent back even when she knew the conversation would be painful, because that child needed an advocate.

It looked like an assistant principal who pushed back in a staff meeting when a policy would have harmed a student with a disability — even when it would have been far easier to stay silent.

It looked like a superintendent who told her board the truth about what the data showed, even when that truth was inconvenient.

That kind of courage — steady, daily, relational courage — is what this moment is demanding from every person who holds a leadership role in education. Not performative bravery. Not political theater. Just the willingness to keep showing up for children, even when the systems around you are failing them.

Why This Is Personal — and Why It Should Be

I am writing a book. I have been calling it Called to Lead, and its central argument is that school leadership is not a career. It is a calling. And callings do not come with an asterisk that says "unless things get difficult."

The qualities I believe define a truly great principal — humility, moral clarity, the capacity to hold a community together under pressure — are not qualities that flourish in a climate of fear. They are qualities that must be actively defended. Modeled. Taught to the next generation of leaders coming up behind us.

Leadership is not a title. It is a daily choice to place the needs of the people in your care above your own comfort. That choice has never been more urgent.

The children sitting in American classrooms right now are watching. They are watching their teachers. They are watching their principals. They are watching what the adults in their lives do when the moment is hard.

What do we want them to see?

A Word to Principals Reading This

If you are a building principal right now, I see you. I know the weight of what you are carrying. The budget cuts. The mandates that contradict each other. The staff who are exhausted. The students who are struggling. The parents who are scared. The political pressures that seem to follow you even into your own hallway.

And I want to say this as clearly as I know how:

Your courage matters. Not in spite of how complicated this moment is — but precisely because of it. The children in your building do not need a principal who has all the answers. They need a principal who is not afraid of the questions. Who will not abandon the most vulnerable students when protecting them becomes inconvenient. Who will tell the truth about what children need, even when the people above them would prefer a different answer.

That is the call. That has always been the call.

What I'm Working Toward — and Why I'm Sharing It Here

This website — The Pandemic Principal — grew out of a conviction that school leadership during and after the pandemic deserved honest examination. The disruptions we all lived through revealed the fractures in our systems, but they also revealed something else: the extraordinary resilience and moral clarity of the educators who refused to abandon their students.

Called to Lead is my attempt to capture what that looks like — and to offer something useful to the leaders who are still in the work, or discerning whether to step into it.

In the months ahead, I will be sharing pieces of that work here. Essays on the qualities that make a principal worth following. Reflections on what humility actually looks like in a building leader. And honest reckoning with what the current political moment is asking of the people who have chosen to lead our schools.

I hope you'll stay with me for the conversation. Because the children deserve leaders who are not afraid to have it.

About the Author

Debbie Diaz-Arnold is a former principal, veteran special educator, and university instructor who spent more than thirty years working inside public schools — teaching students with disabilities, leading buildings as an assistant principal and principal, and preparing the next generation of educators in the university classroom. Today she writes about what courageous school leadership actually looks like, and why it matters for students, communities, and democracy. Her work appears at ThePandemicPrincipal.net, and her first book, Called to Lead: Leading Schools With Courage, Humility, and Purpose, is on the way.