V. Democracy, Not “Education Leadership”
School leaders need to understand the “big ideas”
that should be taught in the core
curriculum. They do not need to be experts, but they should know enough to determine whether
students are being taught the body of knowledge, the
understandings and the skills
that they are expected to learn in the core curriculum.
—Southern Regional Education Board[1]
Educrats
are big on “big ideas.” To hold a conversation with one of these
people is to receive a new and peculiar brand of Holy Communion, to sip the
fine wine of pedagogic theory and jargon, to have their insistent fetish with
the new, the research-based, the learner-centered placed directly into
one’s open mouth (sometimes in mid-objection) like a Eucharist. And
unlike other species of bureaucrat, most educrats rarely lack
enthusiasm—in fact they positively tremble with it. But enthusiasm for what, exactly?
If
the above recommendation from the SREB is any indication, it isn’t
academics. While mere teachers labor away in their classrooms, the educrat is
the all-seeing Eye atop the pyramid of Enlightenment, and that’s just as
it should be. Science, mathematics, literacy, history, the fine arts: these
each have their place, to be sure, but they’re only quaint and provincial
aspects of the integrated “vision” to which the trained educrat
alone is privy. Few Americans, whether within the realm of public education or
outside of it, would dispute the SREB’s recommendation because it makes
sense on that level of pure practicality to which most of us instinctively
respond. Someone’s got to keep their eye on the big picture in any
massive endeavor, after all; that’s why we have presidents, CEOs, and
popes. Yet few policy statements by the dozens of bloated educratic think-tanks
in this country have managed, however unwittingly, to disclose what is wrong
with our public-school system in such naked terms.
Notice
the verbiage: school leaders “do not need to be experts” in any of
the core subjects. The absurdity is so glaring that the casual reader might
assume its practical meaning is more implicit, e.g. that a prospective
administrator whose background is in math need not be an expert at teaching
history. But you would be overestimating the authors’ good intentions to
do so: it is meant to be taken literally, and that should come as no surprise.
For one thing, the educrat class doesn’t value practicality and never has,
and for another (and far more important) point, it will never admit the
inherent folly of placing top-down visionary control of education into the
hands of an entrenched, self-perpetuating pharisaical class…many of whom
have never bothered to truly master a single academic discipline themselves.
There
was a time when most principals and superintendents rose to their offices
directly from the classroom, often with a decade or more of teaching
experience, which in turn implied a reasonable level of intellectual accomplishment
in at least one of the core disciplines. Often the principal was the most
experienced teacher at his or her school—literally, they were the principal teacher. But if such
principals were ever the norm in the United States, they’re all but
extinct now. In most districts, one can ascend to a principalship with as
little as two years’ teaching experience under one’s belt, and
there is at least one movement afoot to repeal even this modest requirement as
“outmoded and inhospitable to leadership development” at the urging
of still another pompous educratic think-tank[2]. Who is taking the place of the
older breed? People with degrees in “Education Administration” and
“Educational Leadership”; people specifically groomed to occupy the
new 21st-Century principalship—as well as those
ever-proliferating non-teaching jobs like “facilitator” and
“coordinator”—under fashionable educratic theory. People who
may not have the first clue how to analyze a Shakespearean sonnet, construct a
voltaic cell or calculate higher derivatives of f, but who nonetheless are deemed most fit to lead
teachers—often their intellectual superiors—through their own
lordly mastery of generic “understandings” and
“skills.”
And
still this would probably be acceptable to most Americans. So much of what
school administrators do is managerial in nature, such as handling discipline
and emergencies, making budgetary and staffing decisions, and planning
schedules. But while it’s unreasonable to assume that managers
can’t be intellectuals and vice-versa, it’s just as unreasonable to
assume that managers should lead
intellectuals, and vice-versa. Yet that is precisely what the educrat class
advocates. Consider a later passage from the same SREB policy statement, an
answer to the rhetorical question of how today’s school principal should
balance these burdensome managerial duties with the school’s
instructional needs:
Many non-instructional situations are the result of low-quality
instruction and the school’s inability to teach all students equally.
This first sentence, at
least, is true enough, but “many” doesn’t mean
“all” by any stretch of the word, and this trite observation only
sidesteps the crucial issue of who is supposed to tend to basic, meat-and-potatoes
school management. Educrats, like all elitists, don’t like to dirty their
hands with housekeeping matters. Does it never occur to them that their own
failure to properly manage schools from the bottom-up, not from
the top-down—to provide safety, security, and stability for teachers and
students alike—might be just as much to blame when bad instruction occurs? (We
ask this question rhetorically, of course.)
Successful principals lead teams composed of assistant
principals, team leaders, department heads and others who share a common point
of view on raising student achievement. The principal should focus the staff on
the important things: teaching challenging content, engaging students in
learning and constantly seeking ways to raise achievement. Principals cannot
delegate the tasks of creating the vision and maintaining the focus. They must
perform the vital function of communicating the school’s goals to
teachers, students, parents and the community.
In
other words, the new principal’s role is neither that of manager nor
teacher; it’s more like armchair guru. As with so much educratic
rhetoric, the words may ring pleasingly to the uninitiated, but try putting
them into practice at your school, and you’ll discover they’re a
roadmap to mediocrity—or perhaps to a career in the fast-food industry.
People with no academic background in math, science, English, or history have
no business telling math teachers, science teachers, English teachers, and
history teachers what their “vision” should be, nor are they in any
position to recommend or evaluate instructional practices within these
subjects. Even in elementary schools, where the curriculum is the simplest and
essentially the same for everyone, teachers don’t need a Grand Wizard, Pontifex Maximus, or Doctor of Education
to define their “vision” and “focus” for them. They
need someone to handle discipline and emergencies, manage the budget and staff,
and make sure the bells and buses run as scheduled while they cope with the intellectual challenges in their classrooms.
Let’s
digress momentarily on what we mean by “intellectual.” It’s
an unpopular word these days, virtually synonymous with “snob” and
“fantasist,” and not without some justification. Ironically, it is
the collective snobbery and fantasism of educrats that we’re seeking to
demolish in this online forum. It may also seem like a laughable word to use in
conjunction with America’s elementary, middle, and even high-school
students, but the fostering of intellect is one of the reasons why the public
schools exist in the first place. In fact, we believe it ought to be the primary reason why the public schools
exist, with college-preparation and job-acquisition as secondary concerns, and
that’s a notion that many educrats wouldn’t dispute. An
intellectual is simply one who uses their intelligence for self-improvement and
greater understanding of the world in which they live. And what is intellect?
It doesn’t mean “intelligence” precisely, but rather what one
does with their given intelligence. It is the function of education to teach
students what they can do with their intellect by teaching them what others
before them have done with theirs. A quality education, therefore, trains
students in the academic disciplines as thoroughly as possible, using the many
pioneers—ancient and modern—in those disciplines as examples. At
the end of their public education, students should possess a wealth of
knowledge and skills that enables them to best decide how to achieve success in
their adult lives. As for what “success” means, that is still up to
every student to decide on his or her own. In the end, if nothing else, the
process of education will have simply provided them with a range of options,
and more optimistically, the wisdom with which to exercise them.
But
in order to pay off, the process requires serious work. It also requires
acceptance on the part of the child. Like adults, children are endowed with the
cosmic gift of freewill, and they indulge in it frequently…sometimes
foolishly, with little appreciation for the potential consequences. A quality
education requires children to learn things that don’t necessarily appeal
to them, that aren’t always fun and exciting, but which must be learned
anyway if the child is going to make informed decisions later in life. The
outcome of education therefore depends not only upon a teacher’s skill
and an educrat’s “vision,” but also the child’s will to
accept the opportunity he or she has been given. Some children will reject that
opportunity no matter how hard we try to convince them otherwise.
And
so here is where we part philosophical ways with the educrats. Open any
acclaimed educratic tome these days—say Best Practice, by Zemelman and Co—and you will find repeated
references to “intrinsic motivation,” “active
engagement,” “student-centered learning” and other phrases
that entail teachers catering to their students’ desires and interests.
Educrats, forever worshipping at the altar of constructivist psychology,
believe the teacher’s role in a child’s education is not central,
but “facilitative,” which automatically demotes the teacher as an
exemplar of intellectual pursuit (i.e., as an adult who has taken the time to
learn an academic discipline to the point of mastery, and the kind of role-model
whom children should be encouraged to imitate). They believe the child’s
emotions must be “engaged” as well as their intellect. They believe
that child psychology, a nescient and questionable “science” in its
own right and a field in which most educrats are not even licensed
practitioners, is the first discipline, the spiritus
sanctus to which all the academic disciplines must answer. There are also
socio-political motives behind their ideology, as evidenced by their
preoccupation with ethnic, racial, and other so-called “equity”
issues. (Ever heard of a “Culturally Proficient Equity Audit”?
It’s coming soon to a school campus near you, devouring precious time and
resources in its path, courtesy of the educrat class. These people never stop
hatching worthless gimmicks.[3]) These are the priorities with
which this new breed of ”instructional leader” is concerned, and
none of them bear any immediate relevance to the academic disciplines. Worse,
when they’re given priority in our schools and classrooms, the message
children receive is that they’re not in school to learn academic
knowledge and skills as they’ve been told—they’re in school
as a kind of charade. They’re in school to play, to do as they please, to
challenge the teacher’s authority. A more accurate phrasing of the first
sentence above would therefore read this way: “Many non-instructional situations are the result of low-quality
instruction and misguided priorities determined by self-righteous educrats.”
For
better or worse, America’s teachers are the first, and perhaps only,
examples of the virtue of intellectual pursuit for America’s students. As
such, they must hold the intellectual authority within schools, not their
educratic masters. The central offices in school buildings and school districts
exist to support the endeavors of teachers, not the other way around, and
it’s high time that America’s public schools were reorganized to
reflect this truth.
Should
public schools be democratic institutions? There are a number of existing
schools and groups that advocate experimental democracy in education—the
idea that students, faculty, and staff should share equally in important
decisions regarding school governance. While this is a noble concept, directly
traceable to John Dewey’s landmark Democracy
and Education (1916), that’s not what we mean here. We’re
talking about putting teachers, collectively, in charge of their own schools,
and individually, in charge of their own classrooms. We’re talking about
teachers working as independent contractors, not anyone’s employees or
subordinates. We’re talking about eviscerating the educrat class,
reducing them to supervisors of bus- and bell-schedules rather than instruction
and “vision.” We’re talking about teachers electing their own
principals for limited terms from within the faculty, making policy decisions
by committee and consensus, and answering directly to school-boards and parents
for the results of those decisions rather than to armchair gurus with phony
credentials and selfish agendas. We’re talking about applying real democracy, equity, and
accountability in what could potentially be our greatest example of democratic
institutions, the public-school system. And after all, if public schools were
created to sustain democracy, why not structure them as living examples of its
ideals?
Currently
the trend in education-administration is to adopt big-business and industrial
models in the management of schools. In theory, this should be bringing about
greater efficiency and productivity, but it isn’t, because as always
happens when educrats misappropriate the ideas of others, the result is only
more inefficiency and a crass reassertion of educratic power. Instead of
churning out more brilliant and capable graduates than ever before, our school bureaucracies
nationwide are imitating the worst, most scandalous aspects of American
business, à la Enron and Wall Street. Superintendents and principals
enjoying “golden parachute” exit packages when they run their
respective districts and schools into the ground. Millions wasted on fads,
consultants, fraudulent research and faulty instructional materials, with
little or no accountability to taxpayers. And, yes, teachers’ unions
exploiting the relative helplessness and gullibility of their members to commit
more fraud, waste, and political skullduggery. Perhaps these abuses can never
be expunged totally, but we believe that if schools were run in more democratic
fashion they’d be exposed and challenged more often, and more openly. At
any rate, it can hardly do any more damage to the nation’s schools and
kids than the present system has.
In
Sane Schools, clear boundaries would be drawn between instructional matters and
mundane, day-to-day organization management. Teachers, who would be hired and
evaluated by committees of other teachers, would have total control over the
former. For the latter, the faculty could elect a “principal
teacher” in the old-fashioned sense, someone who teaches and leads both,
to serve for as long or as briefly as the faculty likes. The principal teacher
would act as general spokesperson for the school, as parent and community
liaison, and would also select or at least determine a list of candidates for a
school manager in the same way that elected mayors hire city managers in some municipalities.
Perhaps for the first time ever, the school administration would have to answer
to its teachers. Instructional questions that affect the whole school or whole
departments could be handled in a variety of ways—by committee, by majority
vote, or by consensus—and would not be subject to the carpetbagger
schemes of an “instructional leader” unless the teachers wanted it
that way. Apart from the state or district standards already in place, no one
person would be allowed to dictate methods to teachers, unless and until the
methods being used were proven to fail…an unlikely scenario in schools
where teachers are masters of subject-matter first and pedagogy second, and
where teachers have the autonomy to do what they already know is right. And
above all, anyone in a position to lead or evaluate other teachers would be a
working teacher themselves, with normal classroom duties and the constant
burden of practicing what they preached. The wholesale dictation of
philosophies, ideologies, practices, and gimmicks from outside sources (like
university schools of education, educratic think-tanks, consulting firms, and
the superintendent's office) might finally be restrained, if not ended.
As
mentioned earlier, there are existing precedents for this idea—not the
least of which are the many private, parochial, and charter schools that have
been using it in various forms for decades. More recently, there’s an
emerging trend of charter schools founded and run by teacher cooperatives,
which is explored in a recent issue of Phi
Delta Kappan[4]. The teachers in these schools are
bucking the authority of their districts, out of frustration with the failure
of their colleagues and superiors to deal with obvious problems and to serve
the needs of their students. They are doing so, in some cases, at the risk of
their own finances, and under the burden of the additional responsibilities
that come with having to act as teachers and administrators both. Noting up
front how much time and money have been wasted on cultivating the new
corporate-style guru and school-principal, author Joe Williams investigates the
efforts underway in a handful of charter schools in Minnesota and Wisconsin,
detailing the great potential for reform that’s unleashed when teachers
are endowed with ownership of their schools, but also gingerly avoiding the
responsibility the educrat establishment bears for driving these teachers to
take matters into their own hands in the first place. The teacher-cooperative
movement may indeed hold the answer to our education problems, but its
appearance is also a testament to the disgraceful failure of leadership
committed by this country’s self-ordained leaders of education, the very
people who are attempting to redefine the role of school principals and administrators
in the 21st-Century according to their destructive
“student-centered” ideology as you read these words.
Good
teachers don’t need instructional leadership, and good schools
don’t need instructional leaders. The vital function of any school
administration is providing safety, stability, and security by attending to
such mundane chores as paperwork, phone calls, materials and supplies, and
discipline. Unfortunately, educrats are too infatuated with “big
ideas” like education leadership to worry about such matters, and the
result is that teachers are being intellectually bullied while their schools go
totally mismanaged. This bizarre combination of micromanagement and
laissez-faire policy could only occur in a world run by snobs and
fantasists…a world run by educrats.
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Site contents copyright © 2007 by James O’Keeffe. All rights reserved. Contact: james@schoolsanity.com
[1] Bottoms, Gene. What School Principals Need to Know. Atlanta: Southern Regional
Education Board, 2007. 20 Nov 2007.
http://www.sreb.org/programs/hstw/publications/pubs/PrincipalsNeedToKnow.asp
[2] “Issue Brief: Improving
Teaching and Learning by Improving School Leadership.”
[3] Lindsey, Delores B. and Randall B. Lindsey. “Culturally Proficient Equity Audits: A Tool for Engaging Every Learner.” Engaging EVERY Learner: The Soul of Educational Leadership. Ed. Alan M. Blankstein, Robert W. Cole, and Paul D. Houston. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press, 2007. 37-57.
[4] Williams, Joe. “Revolution from the Faculty Lounge: The Emergence of Teacher-Led Cooperatives.” Phi Delta Kappan. 89.3 (Nov 2007) 210-216.