A Rant on Bad Administrators

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.