Not surprisingly, I’ve heard, "You seem young for a principal" a lot this year. But, given the data in this New York Times article, that statement is getting made less and less in New York City as young principals are becoming the norm.

One of the principals they interviewed is my good friend and founder of Bronx Laboratory, Marc Sternberg:

It’s a rare moment," said Marc S. Sternberg, 33, who earned master’s degrees in education and business administration at Harvard before becoming the founding principal of Bronx Lab, a small school. "There’s a window of opportunity where the decision makers are open to rethinking how things work, and it’s exciting."

(And here is a recap of my visit to Bronx Lab last fall.)

And Marc is right — this is an exciting time. There are a lot of new ideas, a lot of fresh perspectives… and there are still those who think that young principals don’t belong:

Robert Leder, 67, the principal of Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx since 1979, who spent 13 years as a teacher and six as an assistant principal, said of his young colleagues: "I’m sure they’re intelligent, I’m sure they’re well-intentioned, I’m sure they’re going in with good hearts. But you need all of that with some substance. There is no real replacement, I don’t think, for experience, and that’s what is sorely lacking."

There’s no question that experience plays an important role in the way we lead our schools, but I think there’s also something to be said for not accepting the status quo — and that’s what many of the young principals I know do (and the best of ALL principals, regardless of age, actually.) I think Marc Sternberg has more substance than most folks, regardless of age. I think Chris Johnson at Ben Franklin in Philadelphia is accomplishing things there that few people could.

What sets people like Chris and Marc apart is not their youth, but their ideas, their passion, their care. In fact, let’s stop talking about whether or not young educators can make good principals, let’s instead start talking about we need from all our administrators, regardless of age. Let’s find more teachers with passion and leadership and ideas and intelligence and staying power — and let’s not care if those people are thirty or sixty.

And then maybe the Times won’t want to write about young principals — but rather they’d rather write about all the great principals of all kinds.