Up the administration

I’m new here as a writer (though I’m a longtime reader), and would like to thank Catherine for allowing me to post anonymously when I feel I have something to say. I work in the education industry, and blogging under cover gives me an opportunity to share thoughts and observations that I otherwise could not share.

I’d like to start my blogging career here by pointing to an issue that doesn’t seem to get much play. And that’s the role of school leadership in the problems we see today.

Teachers, and policies related to teaching, seem to get all the attention. There’s a lot of talk about teaching methods, certification, retention, unions, class sizes, and more. And certainly those are important issues: I’m we’ll aware of the research showing what effect a good teacher can have on the life of a child (or on the flip side, the effect a bad teacher can have).

But in all this talk about what happens in the classrooms, it really seems as if school leadership gets to cop a walk. We’re all talking about the crisis in teaching and learning, but no one’s talking about the crisis in leadership, which could absolutely have an impact on teaching practices and on many other factors involved in good schooling.

Principals have the authority to direct resources (staff, funds, and other resources) as they see fit. They set expectations and lay out the ways in which teachers will operate. If there are problems in education today, I believe that school leadership is just as responsible for them as are teachers, and I’d personally say that the school leaders are more responsible for any other group.

Do school leaders share this point of view? Oh lord no.

A few weeks ago I attended a conference for the state chapter of a national school leadership association. Despite all the problems the rest of us see in public education, this group of school and district leaders clearly felt that they had the bull by the horns: they were the solution, not the problem, and they were doing a pretty darn good job of things in their own eyes. And things would be just perfect if just a few things would happen, like eliminating NCLB or giving them a “better” (assumedly richer) group of students to work with.

It’s frightening to hear the leader of any organization saying that things are actually really good in the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, and also believing that anything that’s not good is out of their hands. To see that this thinking isn’t isolated, but is instead the norm, is alarming indeed.

I did some checking after the conference to follow up on what I heard, and came across a fascinating survey report by Public Agenda titled “The Insiders: How Principals and Superintendents See Public Education Today.” Here’s the blurb from the site:

The fourth in a series of Reality Check reports finds that most public school superintendents -– and principals to a lesser extent -– think local schools are already in pretty good shape. In fact, more than half of the nation's superintendents consider local schools to be "excellent." Most superintendents (77%) and principals (79%) say low academic standards are not a serious problem where they work. Superintendents are substantially less likely than classroom teachers to believe that too many students get passed through the system without learning. While 62 percent of teachers say this is a "very" or "somewhat serious" problem in local schools, just 27 percent of superintendents say the same.

So yes, I think it’s worth talking about effective teaching methods and materials, and also talking about how we can get individual teachers to change their ways for the better. But until we address the leadership issue, from which many of these problems originate, we’re going to be treating the symptoms and not the real problem.