Ed Wells

Ed Wells, known as Principal Wells, is the principal of Burroughs Junior High and sits on its school board. His authority gives him influence over discipline, testing policy, and the English department chair appointment. He becomes a consequential foil to Carol Pitt: where she advocates originality and broad involvement with students, Wells supports standardized test preparation and expects rules to be enforced. Their disagreements are real, but the ending complicates their opposition: he ultimately acknowledges Pitt’s commitment and helps secure her promotion.

Identity and Institutional Role

Wells occupies overlapping positions of authority at the school. He is its principal and a member of the school board, so his judgments reach beyond daily administration into the governance of school policy and personnel. Early in the story, Hadley Fox sees Pitt collide with him in the hallway, spilling the contents of her reusable coffee mug onto his shirt. The mishap occurs as Pitt is preparing for her English department chair interview, and Wells’s presence on the board makes the encounter more than an awkward accident: he is also among the people with institutional power over her candidacy.

His position is particularly visible in his dealings with school rules. During the dance, he points out that Burroughs Junior High Code 5.24 requires teachers to assign detention to couples caught kissing on school property. He presents Pitt’s failure to stop a kissing couple as a possible lapse in enforcement, even though he is himself the principal. Hadley challenges that inconsistency by asking whether he, too, should stop the students. The exchange briefly silences Wells and exposes the tension between invoking a rule and taking responsibility for applying it.

Testing and Educational Conflict

Wells’s most sustained professional conflict with Pitt concerns standardized testing. In a conversation with her, he recalls that he had wanted to implement a test-preparation system using tests from the U.S. Department of Education, which he says had produced strong results in other regions. He had been pleased when Pitt finally agreed to administer sample tests, but he interprets her earlier resistance as evidence that her confidence in her teaching may not withstand measurement. The disagreement is therefore not simply about whether tests are useful: it concerns what counts as proof of effective teaching and how far assessment should shape the curriculum.

The conflict has an ironic parallel in Hadley’s own outlook. At the start, she describes herself as a relentless student: after a television report about a comet, she looks up its definition in case it appears on a science quiz, and her extra-credit work helps bring her GPA to 4.3. Later, while speaking as Pitt, Hadley erupts over the pressure to achieve grades and extracurricular accomplishments that might impress highly selective colleges, including Stanford. Her outburst makes visible the personal cost of treating achievement as a continually rising threshold. At Pitt’s interview, Wells’s emphasis on tests and Hadley’s anxiety about scores meet in the same institutional landscape, though the evidence does not make Wells solely responsible for the broader admissions pressures Hadley fears.

Hadley’s temporary experience of Pitt’s role also makes the dispute newly legible to her. At the interview, she recalls their earlier hallway conflict and recognizes that she had resisted Pitt’s approach for reasons resembling Wells’s objections in reverse: Hadley had been drawn toward standardized measures, while Pitt favored a more organic approach to education. The comparison unsettles Hadley’s assumption that the disagreement has an obvious right side. Wells’s testing agenda and Pitt’s preferred curriculum become competing answers to how a school should evaluate learning, rather than a simple contrast between concern and indifference.

Encounters with Hadley and Pitt

Wells’s interactions with Hadley are shaped by the body swap that places the eighth-grade student in Pitt’s adult role. At one point, he notices that she is acting unusually and carefully tells her that he has seen her in two circumstances that morning in which she seemed decidedly off. Believing he is addressing Pitt, he wonders whether she is nervous about the English department interview. Hadley replies that it has been a rough morning, but she cannot explain the real cause without revealing that she has switched bodies with her teacher. Wells’s suspicion is perceptive about the change in behavior, while remaining bounded by what he can plausibly know.

The same reversal gives Hadley an unexpected view of Wells’s professional opposition to Pitt. When speaking as Pitt at the interview, she is asked to defend Pitt’s reluctance about standardized preparation, although she cannot initially recall the earlier dispute. Once the connection comes back to her, she recognizes that she is caught between two educational positions she had previously treated differently: as Hadley, she had been inclined to value tests, while inhabiting Pitt forces her to articulate the value of teaching that cannot be reduced to them. Wells thus functions not only as an administrator who questions Pitt, but also as the person whose challenge makes Hadley confront the assumptions she brought to school as a student.

Wells’s concerns are not confined to educational policy. At the dance, he also observes student conduct and uses Code 5.24 to challenge Pitt. Hadley, speaking as Pitt, turns his criticism back on him by asking why the principal does not stop the couple himself. His response—that he will address the students in due time—does not resolve the immediate inconsistency, but the scene clarifies that his authority can be asserted as a standard even when responsibility for acting on it is disputed.

Pitt’s Appointment and Wells’s Judgment

The dance becomes decisive for Pitt’s career. When Wells approaches her, she is afraid that the opportunity to become English department chair has already passed. At Hadley’s urging, she states that she aspires to the position and would do an exceptional job. Wells answers that it is not too late, then calls Pitt a devoted teacher whose commitment has not gone unnoticed. He congratulates her and reports that the board would like to offer her the chair position.

Wells explains that Pitt’s conduct at the dance strengthened the board’s view of her. She had left prematurely for the sake of a student, a choice that demonstrated her devotion; he admits that the same act moved him. The moment reinterprets his earlier scrutiny. He has challenged Pitt’s teaching philosophy and criticized her resistance to standardized testing, yet he can also distinguish those disagreements from her commitment to students. His approval does not erase the conflict over curriculum; it shows that professional judgment in this case rests on more than agreement with his preferred methods.

The offer is also a reversal of the earlier hallway encounter. On the morning of the interview, Pitt’s spilled drink and the approaching evaluation make her candidacy seem vulnerable. At the dance, a student-centered act that might have appeared to interrupt her professional opportunity instead becomes evidence in her favor. Wells’s acknowledgment converts a potential cost into a qualification, and the board’s offer confirms that Pitt’s care for students has institutional as well as personal consequences.

Characterization and Narrative Function

Wells’s role joins two kinds of school authority: he enforces the institution’s rules and helps determine what the institution values in teaching. His support for standardized preparation places him in direct contrast with Pitt’s more organic curriculum, while the school-board interview makes that disagreement consequential for her advancement. The story does not resolve their educational debate by having Wells abandon testing; instead, it allows him to recognize a quality in Pitt that his preferred measures cannot fully capture.

His interactions with Hadley also create dramatic irony. He notices that the person he believes to be Pitt is behaving strangely and suspects interview nerves, but the actual explanation—the body swap—remains unavailable to him. Hadley, meanwhile, must navigate Wells’s questions while occupying the professional identity he expects. His ordinary, plausible interpretation of her behavior sharpens the contrast between what the characters know and what their positions allow them to say.

At the dance, the Code 5.24 confrontation and the chair decision bring Wells’s two functions together. He begins by invoking institutional discipline, is challenged over his own responsibility to act, and then evaluates Pitt through the more personal evidence of her willingness to leave for a student. That sequence makes him neither a simple antagonist nor a neutral administrator. He represents the force of testing, rules, and oversight, but his final recognition of Pitt shows that institutional authority can respond to forms of commitment that standardized measures and formal procedures do not, by themselves, describe.