School Reform

Recently I wrote about school reform mostly as a way to make a point about the current state of political apathy and to make a call for wider and deeper participation in an important discussion. The final paragraph read

          We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific,
          and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful
          conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic society.

Now I would like to attempt to write something coherent and helpful about school reform, not as an object lesson in the importance of political participation, but as an examination and evaluation of some elements of school reform on the merits.

The basic and very frustrating problem with trying to write coherently about school reform is that the topic is akin to 7-level chess; or to some amorphous being which when any part of it is grasped, seven other parts pop out. How, I ask rhetorically, does one make sense of a phenomenon which includes the following:

          a commitment to "providing" an education for all without a complementary demand that
          all students work to acquire an education

          a commitment to sending all students to the same secondary schools because it is the
          "democratic" thing to do when all evidence shows that by adolescence students have
          demonstrated various levels of intelligence, various talents, and various interests

          a teaching corps which deeply desires to be considered professional while demanding
          to be unionized and to have virtually untouchable job security

          public opinion which harshly criticizes public schooling in the aggregate but has affection
          and admiration for the local school

          academic content standards which have been carefully chosen, sequentially ordered, and
          which offer the opportunity to integrate, but which have led to such a rigorous testing
          process aimed at determining accountability that there is less creative, engaging,
          and humane teaching

Such a list could be extended by a lot, but these will suffice: Trying to get a handle on school reform in some general way is extremely difficult, so I won't try. What I will do is to touch on what I think is a key aspect of any beneficial school reform, the role of the Principal.

 As it now stands, the Principal is not meant to be a visionary, decision-making, personally-engaged leader of a single school but rather a mid-level administrator, a middle manager, whose role is to communicate and enforce the policy decisions presented to her by the district for which she works. In almost all districts, the Principal's role is seen as one that can be filled by anyone who has the requisite credentials, the result being a revolving door of ambitious individuals moving in and out as they work their way up the bureaucratic hierarchy.

Recently I taught a course to graduate students in educational administration in "Transformational and Instructional Leadership." As part of the course, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on "instructional leadership." As you can see, the assumption throughout the presentation was that the Principal was an autonomous professional who had both the right and the duty to make thoughtful and creative decisions regarding the curriculum and teacher performance.

Coincidentally, someone from the university for which I was teaching the course was in class that evening. Her response to the presentation was, "Of course the Principal just has to do what they're told."

Besides being professionally deflating, this was representative of the thoroughly bureaucratic and operational understanding of the Principal's role in the school.

The other important thing to understand about the role of the Principal is that she is not trusted by the people who work for her to make sound, honest professional judgments about the people who work for her. This is part and parcel of the unionization of teachers, a furtherance of the industrial factory model upon which the relation of teachers and administrators was based some 120 years ago. In the world of the factory, there was management and there were the workers. For reasons good and not so good, the workers became organized labor in order to negotiate with management, thereby creating a relationship that was inherently mistrustful and adversarial. This was the model adopted by teachers' unions in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries and which continues today.

On this model, the Principal is "management" and the teachers are "labor." They are not professional colleagues who have different responsibilities but are collaborative colleagues in the best interests of their clients.

But if there is to be genuine school reform, this is one of the things that will have to change. In short, the Principal will have to be in charge of the single school and have both the power and the authority to make decisions about the essential activities of the school, primarily curriculum and teachers.

This would be a radical --- and shocking --- shift. Teachers would have to overcome their mistrust of "management" and learn to conceive of the Principal as a collaborative colleague who also had the authority to hire and fire; that is, as a fellow professional who was also the leader, someone who had the responsibility to lead from within but also had the responsibility to decide, in Jim Collins' now famous phrase, who was to be on the bus and who was to be off the bus.

It is not sufficient to point out that this is a successful, effective, and efficient model for most businesses, for schools are not businesses. But schools are not factories either. Schools are places that should be staffed by autonomous, creative professionals, but that statement has implications regarding demonstrated achievement, ethical adherence, and someone having the decision-making power to reward or admonish, to retain or release.

The contention that the Principal should be an autonomous, creative professional with real decision-making power has implications for far more than the relationship between labor and management and the psychology of teachers. It also has implications for the preparation of teachers and for the preparation of principals.

This is the phenomenon I touched on at the beginning: There is a complex of incoherent and conflicting ideals, ideologies, and mind-sets. It appears to be a Gordian knot, impossible to unravel. Perhaps a more congenial metaphor would be a log jam, in which there is always a key log, which when removed allows the logs to move freely again down the river. In this case, I will choose the role of the Principal as the "key log." Let's see what would happen if we start with a new definition of Principal. What would be necessary? What would have to happen to the preparation of teachers? To the preparation of principals? To the organization of schools? To the thinking about class size and school size? To the concept of accountability?

School reform is dependent on a re-conceiving of what schools are for and how they're organized. In this process of re-conceptualizing, let's start with one thing that we know would be good if it were to be effected and then see what else would have to happen to ensure that. I suggest we start with the re-definition of the Principalship.