So in August, before her senior year, Jones called her and her mother — an assembly-line worker at Ford Motors — into his un-air-conditioned office. He and an assistant principal laid out every report in her school file. Maya was on a path, they said, not to graduate.

The school’s leaders were able to focus on her because Kenwood has a lot fewer troubled students than it used to. The graduation rate reached 85 percent last year, up from 74 percent in 2012, the year that Jones arrived and set out to make Kenwood a great school, despite all of the challenges that its students face.

Virtually every public school in the country has someone in charge who’s called the principal. Yet principals have a strangely low profile in the passionate debates about education. The focus instead falls on just about everything else: curriculum (Common Core and standardized tests), school types (traditional versus charter versus private) and teachers (how to mold and keep good ones, how to get rid of bad ones). You hear far more talk about holding teachers accountable than about principals.

But principals can make a real difference. Overlooking them is a mistake — and fortunately, they’re starting to get more attention. The federal education law passed in 2015, to replace No Child Left Behind, puts a new emphasis on the development of principals. So have some innovative cities and states, including Denver, New Orleans and Massachusetts.

There is no better place to see the difference that principals can make than Chicago. I realize that may sound surprising, given the city’s alarming recent crime surge.