eduskeptic

On Saturday, February 6, NPR interviewed Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education. Coincidentally, or not, the New Yorker magazine ran an article about Duncan in the January 4 edition. Both are illuminating.

This column has written about Secretary Duncan and his complete lack of teaching experience or credentials on more than one occasion. I have opined that perhaps having a background in education isn’t the primary requirement for someone to run the Department of Education. The Secretary doesn’t actually teach anyone anything, and I rather doubt that it’s part of the job description. Secretary Duncan oversees a bureaucracy of several thousand and a budget that is, as he has said,  bigger by a function of a lot than anyone else in his position has had. This is especially true of the discretionary funds that President Obama has allocated to him.

In an earlier article on this forum (Oct. 31, 2009), Secretary Duncan’s staff and their credentials were researched. There weren’t any teaching credentials to be found. This is what was found: of the 31 people listed as assistants to Mr. Duncan, 1 has direct experience with k-12 education, 1 has an MA in Education, and 2 are listed as having taught at the University level, which requires no credential, but may require an MA or Phd. The thought that he was being advised by people with actual experience in the education field, at more than the rookie level, went right out the window. The reality of running the United States Department of Education is related more to that of a large conglomerate than any school, especially any elementary or secondary school.

Which brings us back to the article in the New Yorker Magazine. Duncan has been allotted over 70 billion dollars in economic stimulus funds. He says that this amount is greater by a “factor of a lot” than any other Secretary of Education has ever had. His mandate is probably greater by the same factor than his predecessors also. This column has been openly skeptical of quite a few of the policies and claims of the Washington education bureaucrats.

This writer has also been very open to the idea that something should change in order to improve the delivery of education to students in our schools. The job of Duncan and his managers is to guide the process along, to identify things that, on a national level, don’t seem to be doing any good, and to assist in the business of changing them, and to identify those things that are working, figure out the reasons they are working, and duplicate and improve on them. For people who haven’t any in-depth classroom experience it seems an exercise in pure experimentation and lobbying for career points, especially to those of us who have been in the classroom for many years. What other profession regularly has non-professionals in their field telling them how to do their jobs?

What is important in this entire spectrum is that the need for change is constant. Change doesn’t always come from within. It is just as possible that the impetus for change, the mechanism that will move things forward, will come from just about anywhere. Arne Duncan, while not having any teaching experience, with a deep group of advisor’s who don’t have teaching experience, has said what those of us in the classroom have been waiting for. This is from the NPR interview:

“And I would argue quite frankly that this department has been part of the problem. We have been this big, compliance-driven bureaucracy. I’ve said repeatedly that the best ideas are never going to come from me or from Washington. They’re always going to come from great educators at the local level.”

In the midst of running the Department of Education, perhaps Secretary Duncan could take some time, without the press and photo op corps, to spend some time with those of us who actually teach. It’s just as possible that one of us will demonstrate or say something that will move education forward, a direction that it always needs to aspire to.

Ever wonder who is running the education debate in the U.S.? We hear quite a lot from Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, about the need for changing how we educate children in this country. It seems as though that is one of the key phrases for most politicians. Oddly enough, it’s a good thought. Education cannot stand still and be successful. If it doesn’t evolve, it most surely will  become less and less relevant and successful as time goes on. I doubt that there will ever be a time when we as educators, or as a nation, can quit insisting that our educational systems get better.

Who, however, is in charge of this thrust? Arne Duncan, as has been pointed out many times before, is not and never has been, a credentialed teacher. He does have a senior staff though. I have taken the time to read all of their online bios. I am very curious as to who is advising Mr. Duncan. There are 32 Senior Staff listed, Mr. Duncan included. Of those, 21 have a link to their bios. Twenty-six have links to their home pages. My theory was that, among Mr. Duncan’s advisor’s, there must surely be a solid mix of professionals, with educators well represented. It is after all, the national Department of Education. I read all the online biographies. This is what I found:

Of the 31 listed Assistants to Mr. Duncan, 1 has direct experience with k-12 education, 1 has an MA in Education, and 2 are listed as having been a teacher at the University level.

Russlyn Ali is the Assistant Secretary, Office of Civil Rights. Her bio states that she was a teacher. She has taught at USC, and UC Davis. There is no indication that she has k-12 experience, nor does it indicate what she taught and for how long.

Gabriella Gomez, is the Assistant Secretary for Legislation and Congressional Affairs. She has a Masters in Education from Harvard. There is no indication that she has taught anywhere.

Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, is the Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education. She served as an assistant and deputy superintendent and chief academic officer at Pomona Unified School District, Pomona California. She also served as Superintendent of the district. Her bio states that she was an educator, for 5 years, in the Montebello and Pasadena Unified School districts, where she held various positions, including being a teacher. There is no indication of how long she was an actual teacher in a classroom.

John Wilson is the Executive Director White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He held a position as an associate professor of education in the Graduate School of Education at George Washington University. There is no indication that he has any k-12 teaching experience.

That’s it. Four out of 32 (12.5%) has some direct connection to education, and out of that group, only one (1.3%) is listed as an actual teacher in the k-12 arena. The rest of the Assistants are predominantly lawyers, with a good showing of CEO’s, membership on various boards, trusts, and educational think tanks.

Perhaps it is because I have spent the last 34 years teaching that I think that there should be a solid core of actual teachers advising Mr. Duncan. After all, I would prefer that the person who performs a medical operation on me be a board certified surgeon, not the CFO or CEO of the hospital. I hope that the person sitting in the pilots seat of the airplane I’m riding in is a qualified pilot, and not the president of the airline company.

Maybe that’s the point here though. Perhaps the business of running the nations schools is best left to lawyers and business people. It just could be, that in the minds of the national and state “education secretary” Gliteratti, that teachers are simply irrelevant to the process of better education.

My theory, as stated at the beginning of this piece, has been proved wrong. Apparently there is no solid core of educators advising anyone. The lawyers and business people are the advisors. I don’t know if this is good or bad, as these people all have advanced degrees. That is, fundamentally, very different than being an experienced teacher. I hope that at some time, some of these people talk to actual teachers about the realities of the k-12 classroom experience. It might be helpful in the discussion of what needs to be done. Maybe.

In a recent Harpers magazine article, the thinking of several speakers and writers about education and national policy has been explored. In short, according to the article, there exists among some the stance that we educate simply for return on investment (ROI). The author, Mark Slouka, makes the point that by dehumanizing the educational process, we short change ourselves, and manage, in the process of doing so, to provide a vast disservice to the children we are educating.

Slouka makes a strong case that the business of education has become the business of business. If you have a child in school, regardless of the grade, you will by now have heard that what we have to do in the classroom is get these children ready to be productive once they leave school. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, part of that statement about productivity is that they will be productive in the workplace. If one listens well to the news regarding the state of education in America, one could easily believe that that is the point of education: get them ready to compete in the global, national, or regional marketplace.

Consider this statement by District of Columbia Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee: “This is exactly what life is about. You get a paycheck every two weeks. We’re preparing children for life.” Really? That’s what education is all about? There’s more. Brent Staples, a New York Times editorialist wrote that the the system is failing “to produce the fluent writers required by the new economy.” It just may be that good writing has more value than that. Slouka goes on to quote Thomas Friedman, who wrote about a speech given by Bill Gates, in which Gates says that our high schools are obsolete, that even when doing what they are designed to do, they “cannot teach our kids what they need to know today”. Friedman goes on to further quote Gates, “If we don’t fix American education, I won’t be able to hire your kids.” Slouka has an entire article full of this kind of corporate view of what American education is doing, or not doing.

What are these people thinking? This writer teaches with the idea that his Kindergartners will leave his classroom at the end of the year with a better understanding of the world around them. This writer, a Kindergarten teacher for the last 23 of 34 years teaching, isn’t, by any stretch of the corporate imagination, preparing his students to be pay-check-every-two-weeks robots. With such an outlook on education, why is Michelle Rhee still employed by the District of Columbia School District? Has Bill Gates lost his billions of marbles? Thomas Friedman, whose writing I admire, seems to have adopted the company line as well. Evidently, so has President Obama. Arne Duncan is not an educator, never has been, and probably has no plans to become one. He played a bit of professional basketball in Australia, and is a business man. These are probably the skills he needs to be the Secretary of Education. Would a deep background in education, in the classroom, make a difference in his outlook? It couldn’t hurt.

The purpose of education must be much more broad than this twisted corporate view. If our children are to be leaders and innovators, now and in the completely unknown future, they have to be able to work together, understand history (let’s see–Viet Nam/Afgahnistan/Russia, hmmm), create things that don’t yet exist, engage in civil discourse, and be ready and able to stand up for their reasoned, researched positions. Democracy isn’t an easy road to be on. One can only hope that a well rounded education, strenuously applied, will keep it alive. Narrowing the focus to a paycheck every two weeks ignores the care that a functioning democracy demands. What are these people thinking about?

There exists in eduspeak the theory that, no matter what the mix is in ones classroom, each child/pre teen/teen can be taught as if they are alone in the classroom. That is, one teacher can simply “differentiate” instruction so that, in a class of 20 or so students, each student is receiving instruction for exactly where they are on the learning curve. This writer, over the last 35 years of teaching, has not been able to do any such thing.

The people who make these all inclusive statements about how education can be delivered in the classroom seem to lack one important ingredient: they are not classroom teachers of young children, or, if they were, it was an awfully long time ago. Most University and Community College instructors, in the direct experience of this writer, haven’t the requisite experience in the classroom to know how far off base this all in one classroom actually is. There are, as always, some exceptions to this. John Shefelbine is an exception.

I am pretty sure that the time it takes to teach a concept (a letter sound, digraph, blend etc) to a bright, well fed, enthusiastic child is quite different from the time it takes to teach the same concept to a child who has entered my classroom damaged by life, or who is significantly younger than his peers.

The disruptions caused by children in any classroom, who are unable, for a variety of reasons, to stay on task, take up quite a bit of teaching time, turning it into non-teaching time. Because of the NCLB requirements, children who are under performing will get the bulk of a teachers time. Children who are disruptive to the teaching time in the classroom severely interfere with not only the time that under performing students need and deserve, they interfere with the possibilities for the children who are more than capable of meeting and exceeding whatever the state/federal requirements are.

It is time to restructure, as Arne Duncan likes to say, the way the classroom is run. It is time to allow the very capable students to be in classes that will allow them to accelerate, while the children who are working very hard at basic understanding get the teaching time they need as well. Somewhere in all of the deep thinking, by whoever “they” are who do the deep thinking, but not the classroom teaching, there should be a program developed for the disruptive, at least for a majority of the teaching day, in a classroom of their own. Tracking, you say? Absolutely. Let’s get back to it. Let’s hire enough teachers to separate the learning levels, for a majority of the teaching day, into their own rooms, so that they may, finally, learn at the pace they are capable of. It is patently unfair to inflict disruptive classroom behavior on students who are paying attention, in the name of “mainstreaming” or “full immersion”. While that sort of theory may feel very good to the adults who put it forth, and who aren’t classroom teachers, it simply doesn’t work well in the real world of the everyday classroom.

The federal stimulus money that is scheduled for schools may not make it to California, where I teach. Seems as though the Feds are requiring a system to track teachers and student progress, and to couple them somehow, for some reason. Currently, we have no such system, although I believe that Jack O’Connell, our state Super of Schools, has said that we will, or maybe we do and the Feds just don’t understand what we have and how it complies with the Fed requirement.

I have written before about accountability. It can be a boost to the system and pretty good, or it can be another political opportunity for complete stupidity amongst the politicians in this state, something that is in abundance right now. Since public schools are funded by public tax money, it is reasonable for the taxpayers of this state, and all other states, to demand some accountability. They, and I am one of the “they”, have a right to expect to know how the money is spent and what the results are.

Accountability for student success in the classroom is a very difficult batch of results to measure. There are quite a few variables that are rarely, if ever, taken into account by those who think the school system is incapable of actually educating students. The hue and cry from this group is often that schools should be run just like big business is run. Here are, again, some of the variables: students come from intact families, divorced families, single parent families, loving families, completely dsyfunctional families, no families at all, violent families, absentee families; students come to school developmentally ready, developmentally out of place, well fed, hungry, clean, dirty, alert, sleep deprived, intoxicated, abused, relaxed, stressed out. This type of list can get to be quite lengthy.

According to NCLB (no child left behind), all of these children are supposed to be at grade level, at the same time, at a precise time in the near future. I am willing to be held accountable for the complete success or failure of the disparate group of Kindergartners in my room if, and only if, we adopt the Wall Street model of compensation and bonuses.

In an article in the Sacramento Bee today, July 31, compiled form the New York Times and the Los AngelesTimes, figures released by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo provide a very interesting look at how Wall Street and the banks compensate their staffs: 4,793 bankers and traders were paid more than $1million in bonuses last year. Keep in mind that profits shrank, and the biggest banks got billions of our dollars to keep them afloat. Citigroup, Bank of America (which now includes Merrill Lynch), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase are just the tip of the iceberg of names of financial institions that passed out billions, in bonuses, last year. Here is the best part, according to Cuomo’s report: “When the banks did well, their employees were paid well. When the banks did poorly, their employees were paid well. And when the banks did very poorly, they were bailed out by the taxpayers, and their employees were still paid well.”

That’s the business model I want applied to me and my teaching and the success or lack thereof of the students in my classroom. No matter what, I get paid well, with big bonuses. It’s a business model I can finally live with when applied to education.

The Governor of California, as mentioned in an earlier post, thinks that the wave of the future for education is digital textbooks. Maybe, he has a point. Maybe, he hasn’t thought it all the way through yet. I don’t know what the Governors of other states are thinking in regards to this issue, but it is far from simple. I haven’t heard much lately about the issue, as California is on the verge of running out of money to pay its bills and perhaps that is a more pressing issue, although you certainly couldn’t tell by what the legislators in Sacramento are doing. I’m curious as to how the digital textbook thing will work. What will the publishers do? The California Governor actually said “free” in reference to digital textbooks, but somehow I think that word isn’t in the everyday lexicon of the textbook publishing industry. I suspect that whether it’s in print or delivered electronically, they will want to be paid. Now, the printing industry just may take a bit of hit on it though, as it may mean they’re not going to be printing hard copies of the texts, or at least not as many.  I’m also interested in how the educational community, already hanging on by a mere financial thread, will be able to provide this digital experience to all of the students in the system. Marina Leight, at Converge Magazine, has mentioned it as well. It’s a complex issue, as all things governmental and educational tend to be. I’ll be doing some research on the issue for future posts, but in the meantime, if you have any ideas, please do let me know what they are.

Some Facts

Arne Duncan is the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration. The education department has4,200 employees and a $68.6 billion budget. Who is he, and what qualifies him for this position?  From June 2001 through December 2008 Duncan ran the Chicago School District. It is the third largest in the country with over 600 schools, and he was tasked with transforming  its weak schools into strong ones, closing the ones that were not performing, and improving the overall quality of teachers and teaching. His title, which will become pertinent to this post in a paragraph or two, was Chief Executive Officer. Most school district heads are known as Superintendents.  According to his biography, he has done a  quite a few things over the years (Ariel Education Initiative, Inc.), none of which involved or included teaching. He does not hold a teaching credential from anywhere, and he has never taught anywhere. He did, however, play professional basketball in Australia. He holds a degree in sociology from Harvard. Where in all of this does it become apparent that he is qualified to be the Secretary of Education for the United States?

What Does it Take?

In an earlier post on this blog, I pointed out the difference between the jobs of teacher and principal. I made the point that educational leaders are in the classrooms. Good principals make it possible for teachers to teach, and good teachers make it possible for principals to run the school well. The job of principal is wildly different from that of superintendent, and because of sheer scale, superintendent positions are different from chief executive officer positions. Superintendents are responsible to school boards for everything in the district: education, facilities, transportation, legal matters, everything. Principals are responsible to the superintendents for everything at their school. What does a chief executive office of a school district do? About the same thing that a superintendent does, except on a much, much larger scale. Running a district with over 600 schools, k-12, with an overall budget in excess of $500 million, just might be a bit different than running a district with 100 or fewer schools, with a budget in the $100 million range, or a small district with a few schools and a $10 million budget.

Does It Take An Educator?

I don’t think so.  While it is possible that some very large districts have CEO’s or Superintendents who once were teachers, and may have empathy for the every day classroom situation, the necessary skills to be successful as the head of a very large school system are more likely to be business skills, not educational skills. The complicated web of laws that pertain to schools, the mountains of paperwork, the politics and the fiscal complexity of the entire thing need management expertise. The heads of these very large school systems have assistants for just about everything. They rarely see the inside of a classroom, talk to teachers, or union/association people either. They delegate that sort of thing to the assistants, who in turn report back to them. Management meetings rule the day, and probably necessarily so. Arne Duncan is a manager, not an educator, which is what the Secretary of Education needs to be.

Is He The Right Person?

Not everyone in Chicago will think so. Duncan closed some schools, and everyone at those schools had to reapply for their jobs. Not everyone was successful at being re-hired when the schools re-opened. The schools he closed were in dismal shape. Most of those schools are doing better now. Google it and find out for yourself what happened in Chicago. I heard him on NPR the other day, and he sounded every bit like a CEO on a mission. He’d better be. The President is expecting him to accomplish a great deal, and I doubt that it will get accomplished without an enormous personality, energy, and sense of urgency. Not everyone is going to agree with his approach. My personal position is that our educational system isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be, and absolutely needs to be better than it is. Re-inventing how we educate children is not an activity for the faint of heart or risk averse types. I don’t think Arne Duncan fits either of those descriptions. He doesn’t have unlimited time or funds available to him. Judging from what he did in Chicago, he may actually make some headway. I am looking forward to what happens next. Time will tell if he is the right person, at the right time, to foster needed changes. In the meantime, assume nothing, verify everything. Check it out for yourself.

It is a magical time of year for everyone in school. It doesn’t matter where you are in the system: head start, pre-school, all the way up to grad school. It’s magical. All of the work that students have done finally pays off. Another crop of grads is on the way to the next step. For the younger grads, the next step is a nice summer break, followed by the next grade level and the new experiences that go along with it. For the University level grads, the next step is into the unknown. About the only thing known for sure is the amount of debt that they are carrying. Perhaps the biggest question is whether the grads are ready for the profession that they have chosen. The hue and cry from the business world, at least according to the yearly outpouring of words in the national press, is that the grads aren’t ready. Oddly though, business hires new grads all the time. Ready or not. It is difficult in the extreme for any educational enterprise to provide educational experiences that are specific enough for any business block, or public sector group, to use without further work. It is a ridiculous demand to make. There is always further learning and education about the work to be done in any job situation.

The System

The main job of the educational system is to build a solid base of some skills: reading, writing, math, art, science. Depending on the chosen field, one of those five will have greater focus. More importantly, the educational system, at least here in the United States, teaches exploration, critical thought, the importance of continuing to learn, and how to continue to learn. Learning doesn’t stop with the cap and gown experience. Graduation from University, Trade School, or Tech School, is the beginning. Stepping into a new job with the confidence that comes from a solid background is always a plus. It is, still, a beginning. Employers actually expect employees to show up and work and to do what is required. The halcyon days of school, the protected bubble of the campus, are over at this point. If the educational establishment has done its job, over the span of the last18 to 20 years, the transition to the work force, in whatever form it takes, will work well.

Into the Wild

As the graduations continue throughout June, the excitement of grads and parents, and all those connected to the grads, is replayed from town to town, across the nation. It is well earned excitement. Eduskeptic sends out congratulations to all who have persevered and made it to the end. Good for you all. You did it, and should be proud that you did. Take a moment and savor the people who helped you get here, the friends you made along the way, and the brief moment that exists before reality kicks in. Best of luck to all of you!

I had the opportunity to attend the west coast Government Technology Conference in Sacramento, CA, last Wed and Thurs, May 13&14. I have enjoyed this conference over the years for a number of reasons. I get to meet vendors of just about everything that I use or might use, talk to different company reps and specialists about trends, what’s working and what is vapor ware, and what’s toast already, what changes have taken place in the market place since last year, and pick up a pen or two with cool logos on them. I get to experience talking with adults all day too, which is vastly different than my normal day. I also get to sit in on various presentations and discussions that are of interest to me, or that I think will be of interest to my district and our technology needs and dreams. Last year I watched a fantastic presentation on interactive white boards, and a system that basically puts a fully functional computer desktop on the white board at the front of the classroom. For those of you of a certain age, blackboards all but disappeared some years ago, along with chalk. They are now whiteboards, and one uses non-permanent markers on them. I got to see the system in action when I talked with a rep at the Western Blue booth. He was using a system that put the desktop on his rather large screen, about the size of a classroom white board, fully connected to the Internet, fully functional, while he looked up some information on it for me. Very impressive. Expensive, but impressive nonetheless. This was very interesting to me, as the subject of interactive whiteboards has been spoken of, and dreamed about, by some teachers in our district, over the last few years. I was able to bring a great deal of information, and enthusiasm, back to school with me. This year I attended a session on “Demystifying the Stimulus Package”. It was presented by Paul W. Taylor, Phd. of  Converge Magazine, with a number of vendors co-hosting the event. During a rather nice lunch we were able to meet other educators, vendors, and administrators. I sat a table with one of the head IT people at San Francisco State, two reps from Cisco, and two from Elluminate. While the seating was completely at random, I couldn’t have chosen better had I been given a list. First, the Cisco guys are experts at networked systems. Second, the Elluminate reps were experts at putting together distance learning for school districts. The San Francisco State guy uses Elluminate all the time for various projects at SFS. We had a good working lunch. The main topic of the session, the stimulus package and what it means for education, included quite a few participants who spoke of the need, in addition to saving jobs, to begin using the technology tools we have today, in the classroom. It is not a given that school districts are using any of the technology that is available to the private sector. We do have computers, the age of which may be shocking to anyone who hasn’t been in a classroom lately. We do have high speed internet pipelines to our sites. Whether we have a good enough infrastructure to carry the highspeed past the entry point is different from district to district, state to state. We don’t have enough computers for all classrooms to have them. A computer lab may have, and may not have as well, current edition computers, and may or may not have a lab person who actually knows not only the machines, but who is able to work with children as well. Printers, ink, and anything more exotic than that may or may not either exist, work, or be available to all classrooms. What does all of this have to do with demystifying anything? Read on. There was quite a bit of talk about online education, online textbooks, either instead of or in addition to, hard copy texts, distance learning, and a constant ability of any student to connect on line to access school curricula, any time, from anywhere. Exciting stuff, to be sure. I think that having the ability to access curricula, assignments, and assistance, over the internet is one of the parts that will help students succeed. Children come to school, in Kindergarten, with greater technological knowledge and skills, than one can imagine. Their knowledge and use of technology grows from there, and it grows in leaps and bounds. If we aren’t able to keep up with what they have outside the classroom, we may just lose them. The enthusiasm from the private sector, the vendors and company representatives, is truly great, as it should be. They have some really cool things to offer. Maybe the stimulus package for education will help districts participate with some of it. One participant spoke about all students having an iPhone or Blackberry, and how they could then connect anytime, anywhere to the good old World Wide Web to access education. Doesn’t that sound good? After I left the session I headed to the ATT booth on the expo floor. I wanted to know how much it might cost, per person, for a level of connectivity that would allow web access from a hand held of any kind. Rough guess: $60-$70 US per person, per month. That is in addition to the cost of the hand-held device. Do the math for your district. The stimulus package seeks, in one small part of the education section, to erase the digital divide, that is, the discrepancy between those who have and use technology and those who do not. The cost is simply staggering. The digital divide is just as likely to widen as it is to shorten. In a catch-22 twist, the very people who are most likely to help with erasing the technology chasm, the good, enthusiastic, up to their ears in technology since they were born, young teachers, are the very ones who are losing their jobs due to the lack of funds for school districts. While the demystification of the stimulus is somewhat complicated, and the session offered good information about a broad range of monies coming to education, what remains a mystery is how, especially in the economic times we are experiencing now, are we going to pay for what the enthusiastic company reps have available. There is definitely another divide out there. It’s the divide between private business and public schools, how they are funded and run, and how the private sector has no clue about the Alice in Wonderland experience of school finance, which may never be demystified. Maybe next year we can have a session about demystifying school finance.

I have been teaching for over 30 years. In that time I have been through seven superintendents and about ten principals. Six of those principals I worked with in a teacher/principal relationship. The other four, or maybe five, I worked with as head of the Teachers Association. Some of these administrators were wonderful to work with. A few were, and probably still are, just plain rotten. Had I the authority to fire them, I would have. I’m equally sure that some of them would have loved to fire me too. I did carry on a professional relationship with all of them, either as a teacher, or as an association representative. I have been approached more than once over the years to consider becoming an administrator. I have chosen to stay in the classroom, for reasons I will get to in a short bit. In a recent article, Margaret Gaston wrote about the declining numbers of teachers pursing administrative credentials. It is an interesting article. In it, she says that only “… 48 percent of California principals say they plan to stay in their jobs until retirement, compared with 67 percent nationally, and only 22 percent of California’s secondary principals plan to do so.” Briefly, she notes that it is important to strengthen recruitment and retention of the administration portion of the school systems. A study by Ken Futernick of California State University, Sacramento, mentioned in the same article, points out that “…42 percent of teachers who leave the field cite ‘an unsupportive principal’ as a reason for leaving.” He says that 52 percent cite poor administrative support at the district level.

The job of principal, or superintendent, is vastly different from that of a teacher. The job of principal is one of administration, one of managing. In these days, at least in California, that job has gotten to be very complicated. Now, I think that anyone who wants to be a principal should be required to spend a minimum of five years in the classroom, if for no other reason than to get a basic understanding of what it takes to be a teacher, full time, in the classroom. Without that experience, school management shifts into the realm of magical thinking. Past that point, principals don’t teach, nor should they be expected to, any more than I should be expected to perform administrative duties.The principal has quite a full plate without attempting to be the “educational leader” of a school. I’ve not met one yet who is. I’ve met a few who thought they were. They weren’t.  I know teachers who think they know how to run a school. They don’t. Certainly, the principal must be the administrative leader of the school, the person who provides direction, support, guidance, and when necessary, discipline, for staff and students.The principal must keep up with the myriad of laws, deadlines, and edicts that govern a school and a school district, an Alice in Wonderland type of experience. I depend on my principal to keep all of that away from my classroom so that I am able to do my job, which is to teach. The principal at my elementary school somehow manages, in addition to everything else, to visit every classroom several times a year to present science lessons. He becomes the Principal of Science on these forays. It is an amazing effort, and something the children enjoy and learn from. He doesn’t pretend to be the educational leader. He’s a great Principal of Science though. Earlier, I said that I chose to stay in the classroom. The reasons are many. The principal at my school gets there before I do, and leaves after I do. His contracted days are longer than mine. His nights and weekends are full of school things, while mine are not. While I spend my days with the complexity of the behaviors of very young children, and other teachers deal with the craziness of middle school or high school students, the principal spends his days with parents, who are either happy with or disgusted with, something that happened at school/on the bus/at the bus stop/on the internet, legal issues about everything, deadlines for forms, meetings, money, clubs, curricula, student and staff problems, maintenance, and the district office.  If this person, the principal, doesn’t have adequate training for administering this mishmash of issues, he or she will fail. It is important for the principal types to have support and continuous training in not only in the business end of running a school, but in the people end as well. Teachers are not altogether easy to manage, even under the best of circumstances. It’s a difficult mix to master, and when it isn’t, some teachers, especially the young ones, leave the profession as a result. The screening process for gaining an admin credential should be rigorous, just as it should be for teachers. We cannot afford poor quality on either side of the equation. The last thing a teacher needs is a principal who is incapable of being honest, human, supportive, and knowledgeable. Now, on top of all this, the principal simply doesn’t make enough money for me to have jumped into that pool. It is a complex and demanding job, just as mine is. It is not a surprise to me at all that the number of teachers wanting to go into the administrative ranks, or stay there, is less than robust. One thing that I want to point out, which is a different from what Margaret Gaston says in her article: school leadership is not vested in the principal, or any other single source. It is a partnership between teachers and principals. Educational leadership is in the classroom, not the principals office. Administrative leadership is in the principals office, not the classroom. The success of a school results from a working relationship between the two.