The good, the bad and the incompetent

This in response to a former student and friend, one of the brightest and best of a whole slew of great kids over 20 years. her husband is teaching and he and the faculty in general are being jerked around by crisis managing administrators. It is, sadly, a syndrome with which I am not unfaniliar.

        All too frequently, such shoddy treatment is more an indictment of shitty administrators who fail to either make expectations clear, adequately explain and train to said expectations, or in the majority of the cases, crisis manage every event of the school year. Secondarily, it also arises  because of parents who want us to do things which ought to be  their jobs and then bitch about it when we do. I entered the public school teaching profession at the age of 49 with a master's degree in Human Resource Management having been exposed to and having exercised significant real leadership in a ,military setting when it really mattered over the previous 26 years or so. I was appalled at how little real knowledge of  people skills I saw evinced by many school  administrators.  Sadly, for faculty, this can sometimes mean becoming so used to bad or no leadership that a real leader who defines realistic goals, timelines and expectations is sometimes met with the well known and documented "resistance to change" syndrome which is a part of human nature.  Good schools are teams. Unfortunately many are not.

         As a codicil to this rant, and in fairness, There is a large and widening gap between generational norms of management and behavior, as the below chart points out..  

       A 60"ish" principal who expects a knee jerk positive response without question from a gen X,Y, or millennial teacher will almost assuredly be sadly disappointed. Tragically they probably have never been trained to know the difference. And yet, here we are with administrators being told by other administrators, ad nauseum,  that what is really important is the  meaningless "flavor of the month", hottest thing from California, being sold by a guy who has never actually done a year of public school teaching (can you say Marzano?).  We have repeatedly cycled through such crap, seemingly forever, driving potentially good teachers from the profession (along with shitty pay) while enabling marginal ones who connect all the dots like good little robots to remain and become entrenched in their marginality.  

     We would be far better served to allow real leadership and management training for administrators who already have the daunting task of  encouraging (supposedly) , training, and enabling brand new wide eyed  college graduates for success in what is at once the most frustrating and rewarding occupation there is.  We put these newbies at the mercy of administrators, some of  whom are only in their current job because either they really didn't like/weren't good at teaching or,  in many cases, left the classroom for more money.  The Peter Principle applies far too often in this instance.

       In any case  administrators who don't see the need to at least understand, if not identify with, their non age-peer faculty members can do more harm than good. I saw the gamut of administrators over 20 years at the same school, and was lucky for the most part, but as a  12 year member of the Classroom  Teachers' Association contract  committee in the nation's ninth largest school district,  I heard  horror stories of managerial and leadership incompetence which were staggering indictments of the supervisor/administrator  selection and appointment process.  We often saw elementary school principals who, apparently  believed that it made perfect sense to treat adult teachers, regardless of age, just like 6 year olds. Sad really. On one hand we expect top line professionalism from  23 year olds who are learning their craft, and stomp on their initiative and crucify them for not being perfect with all leadership ability and tactful guidance of  Donald Trump.