Bad
administrators mismanage schools. If you have a bad administrator, for your own
sanity, find a different teaching job or figure out a way to get rid of the bad
administrator. Bad administrators will put too many children in a classroom and
not provide federally mandated services. They bully children and teachers. They
often can’t understand complex classroom organization or do competent
observations of classroom teaching. They may hide from the classrooms and
students in meeting and their offices.
I know of
situations where children were put in classrooms with an unqualified aide and
received no instruction for much of a year. When administrators mismanage
schedules, children and teachers are often stuck in a catch-22, but the only
solution is to advocate for yourself and your students. Stop complaining. Come
up with a good plan and calmly and rationally explain it to your administrator.
Keep at it; giving up is giving in to a bad status
quo. Sometimes several teachers have to work together to build a plan and
then implement it, using the famous principle: It’s easier to receive
forgiveness than permission. Together a group of teachers can change how a
school works, and indeed they are the only ones who really can.
Teacher
groups need to know more than the person(s) assigning them to impossible
situations. It always comes down to a teacher or a group of teachers making the
curriculum and the schedule work. Having children with abilities from
non-reader through college-level in any classroom is difficult, but rearranging
the schedule can help provide instruction for this diversity. Finally,
published materials (the stuff that so often get misnamed curriculum) and
standards are guides, not perfect absolute laws, so the teachers have to make
everything work. The materials, ideas, strategies, organization, GLEs (grade
level expectations), standards, and
assessments that teachers and children need to become a working community
engaged in learning everything they can are available in a variety of media.
Don’t let an administrator bully teachers into using only one thing. In that
community, children can become tutors and teachers and model all sorts of
things for each other. If an administrator or a teacher says, "Whatever is
in the curriculum is law," then that administrator or teacher has a fundamental
misunderstanding of curriculum.
Unfortunately
under the testing regime built during the Clinton-Bush-Obama presidencies, rigidity
is proclaimed, and children have been relegated to the null curriculum. They
are more than hidden; only test scores are valued. Usually personal
philosophies, values, beliefs, backgrounds, psychological stances,
personalities, discipline processes, and attention are parts of the hidden
curriculum, but so are gender differences and issues related to bullying and
punishment. In many schools today, the needs of the children are hidden or
nullified by attention to set procedures, scheduled rigidly, lists of skills or
standards, books that must be taught, assessments of the testing regime, and a
multitude of regulations that make the functional classroom impossible,
including paperwork and red tape. The children and their needs must be
acknowledged as part of the curriculum and everything can be changed to provide
for them, flexing based on their knowledge, processes, skills, beliefs, and
performances. Using the children’s knowledge base as a starting point for
performance allows teachers to set high expectations for progress. Only idiot
administrators and legislators mandate that every child perform the same way on
the same test at the single assessment period.
Planning
the year in advance can only work in very broad terms because with the real,
active students and the teacher’s analysis of them, the real planning and
curriculum must be built with the collusion of the students, using their
skills, reading levels, analytical skills and creativity – and, of course, the
teachers! Furthermore, if something doesn’t work, the teacher has to figure out
new ways to reteach, changing teaching style, lesson orientation, practicality,
real life application, hands-on materials, or something, to those who didn’t
get it, and it takes time, especially if the teacher needs to back up and cover
things that are necessary prerequisites to the concept being taught. In the
current schools, the time frame is far to short for mastery of most concepts so
the treatment must be superficial and spiraling (for which we have Jerome
Bruner to thank). If we don’t take the time, the child is lost, and the
administrator forcing the teacher to skip ahead is responsible for that failure.
We need administrators who figure out how to do everything that’s needed for
children to succeed, not ones who shove children on whether ready or not.
This policy
rigidity from legislators and administrators cuts children out of the picture.
It bruits a process of bullying teachers rather than developing them and
implies the same for children. It destroys professional development. It posits
that teachers’ test scores are more important than experiences. It promulgates
the legalistic view that all teachers are bad and deserve punishment. It
prevents administrators from seeing that some children are being lost, and
those administrators seem powerless to provide remedies that should help
teachers help the children who are floundering. The standard is taught
regardless of whether the child is ready for it or already knows it. The same
old response is given, and we relearn that insanity is doing the same thing
over and over and expecting different results. These policies are constantly
sacrificing the child on the altar of test scores. Now teachers are being fired
and replaced with the cheapest possible labor which will only last for a
maximum of two years. Thus, rigid policies lead to failing schools. But good
administrators learn to work with teachers, parents, and students.
How do we
close the gap? Learners’ background knowledge, vocabulary, and conceptual
knowledge need to be the major focus – not the stuff or the strategies or the
organization. The Curriculum-as-Stuff Model, promulgated by bad
administrators adopting program without teacher involvement, holds the idea
that children learn only through the consumption of published materials and
tests. It includes teachers who teach with stuff rather than ideas and
classroom organizations that meet the needs of the children. The
Curriculum-as-Stuff Model is an outgrowth of mass consumerism and the testing
regime, which opposes the idea that children need to encounter thinking, caring
others who communicate and explore their worlds with them.
Obviously we tell learners that we care about them by having
clean, well-supplied classrooms and schools; artifacts are useful and
interesting, but the key idea is to know where the learners need to go (goals,
standards, and objectives!) and to find interesting, fascinating activities
that engage them towards those goals. Only the good teacher can build this
complex idea-based curriculum. Even with everything the teacher needs, teaching
is a hard job. Good teaching is even harder. Outstanding teaching is almost
miraculous. It isn’t what’s portrayed in the movies. Getting children to have a
wide range of experiences and the language to discuss those experiences is
demanding! Field trips, especially for young children, are vital, but they only
work if talk surrounds them, before, during, and after rather than drill,
drill, drill and test, test, test.
Early
literacy programs for disadvantaged children are essential. They need extremely
skilled teachers and, ideally, involved parents. Usually children with low
vocabulary levels come from literacy poor environments. These children need
immersion in language rich environments. They need teachers and other adults to
talk to them and to read to them (2-5 books a day, newspapers, magazines,
cereal boxes, charts, lists, names), but always high-interest, age appropriate
materials. They need to play and talk while they’re playing, rather than silent
classrooms. They need letter blocks, work magnets, class libraries, technology,
and, of course, real libraries with librarians. Head Start is not working
because in scaling it to a national program, quality was lost. The well trained
teachers and aides were replaced with minimum-wage workers and not given
adequate training. Very often it takes more cost to replicate a program than to
start a new one. Of course, that means
that good teachers must control the curriculum not some "Big Brother"
far from the classroom. Supposedly “scientifically verified” programs, like
‘Success for All’ under No Child Left Behind were the cures for all the
problems in schools. The name is clever. The research is not. I’m still looking
for empirical evidence that standards and testing are improving student
performance on a range of standardized tests, but the evidence it that these
two “innovations” are not producing any results other than minimal fluctuations.
Successful
public schools are all around. Look at parishes outside New Orleans. Look at
the Harlem Children’s Zone Project of Geoffrey Canada (http://www.hcz.org/). Dr. Canada has worked for years
to bring health and wellness and literacy activities to pregnant mothers-to-be
and help with their children from infancy. BUT there is enough money in the
public school systems to do all this. There were funds available for other
cities across the country to replicate The Harlem Children's Zone. NOLA
applied, but I don't think anyone here received the funds.
We need
teachers and administrators who have intellect and passion and caring. We need administrators who were good teachers.
We don’t need more rigid, inflexible rules. We must continue to talk and take
action. We need policy makers who will reconsider the use of standardized tests
as the only measurement. We need policies that prevent micromanagement. We need
administrators who stand up and talk about the weaknesses and evil of the standardized
testing regime, and who refuse to be bullied. We need to be gadflies in the
ears of legislators and other elected officials. We need teachers who
subversively meet the needs of children when the dictators say thou shalt teach
things based on a schedule that puts the children in the Null Curriculum. We
need politicians who listen to teachers and not just the moneyed interests. The
bureaucracy of education needs to be flatter, and we need educators at the top
and not just politicians and governor’s hand-picked weasels. Since teachers are
usually in the trenches and do not have time to advocate for themselves, we
need groups that do advocate for teachers and the children they teach. We have
to continue saying the things we're saying about the failures of NCLB, the
Common Core, and all the other federal measures related to education that have
failed.
Politics is
a part of education and human life, so that won’t disappear. Since those
"scientifically-based" programs don't work outside of their more
carefully controlled norming groups, policy wonks and legislators need to hear
about alternatives like small community schools with caring teachers and
administrators. Certainly schools need a head – someone “in charge” from the
point of view of government bureaucrats, but "in charge" in a school
is a vast contradiction (my Daoism is showing). We are talking about the lives
of children!
Many
administrators want the illusion of control and become god-emperors or goddess-empresses
of their little kingdoms. They want everyone to obey their patriarchal aristocratic
divinity. They are not the good ones! Some of them are in prison now for
embezzling money from their schools. Good administrators and legislators with
an interest in education need to spend time in schools, talking to children and
teachers, rather than central office staff and state supervisory boards with
noses hidden in computers where they’re typing madly for documentation or
reading their e-mail. Of course, just a little power is addicting. Maybe one
good thing about the post-Katrina school confusion is that the huge bureaucracy
of the Orleans Parish Public Schools has been demolished.
We need
administrators who can talk about good teaching and help teachers develop by
making teachers the masters of the curriculum that they really need to be.
Teachers need to be the leaders and the innovators because they are the ones
working with children. They need to manage their professional development and
be active, intellectually curious life-long learners who constantly seek new
learning experiences and ideas to use with their students. We need teachers who
get subversive and get good test scores because their students really have
learned much more than what is on the tests. Administrators have hard jobs,
too, but bus schedules, maintenance, and cafeteria workers should not be the
main focus; instead, finding, keeping, and supporting good teachers and caring
for the children in the school should be the main daily activity.
