It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks rather
than as individual persons. These tasks
can then be distributed within the system, either to make administration
do-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building level
administrator entirely. Improving
education means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the way
of the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.
Many would say that we need to do
a better job of recruiting, training and inducting administrators. There are also those that would say that we
should look for administrative talent outside the ranks of educators, and
recruit administrators from the ranks of business and industry.
Neither of these solutions has
much promise. If improved recruitment,
training and induction of administrators were a solution, we’d already be doing
it. At best, it can produce a handful of
superstars, when what we need is systems to elevate the practice of the average
administrator. Those systems are doomed
to failure because the job is itself unreasonable – you have to be “superman”
(or woman) to perform it. Systems that speak
to the average are an inefficient way to create the exceptional.
Likewise, recruiting from outside
the profession means you will recruit people with a subset of skills needed for
successful administration, but certain skills, like evaluation, curriculum and
assessment, are so deeply rooted in classroom practice that an educational
leader from outside would be rendered dependent on others, or risk failure in
these key categories.
This points to a simpler
solution: why not re-conceive administration as tasks rather than individuals,
and then distribute these tasks within the organization to people with the
skills and talent to perform individual tasks well? Then a range of administrative solutions
become possible:
- Elimination of the building administrator: The more radical solution is found in a handful of teacher led schools around the country. At the Math Science Leadership Academy, an elementary school organized by union leaders in Denver, administrative tasks are distributed among a team of teacher leaders. The existence of a strategic compensation model, ProComp, encourages leadership work engagement among teachers. But to succeed, communities have to let go of traditional paradigms of the classroom and school: one teacher full time in the classroom (leadership work requires release time within the student day), and the single “go to” administrator as the ombudsman for every issue.
- Reconceptualizing administration as traffic
control: This model is found in the Plattsburgh
NY City School District where superintendent Jake Short believes in
cultivating and “driving down” decision making capacity in the system to
the level of implementation, where the information to make good decisions
actually exists. Short monitors the
resulting decisions for quality, and legality, and to make sure that the
necessary decisions are in fact made and implemented. When interviewing Short, I pressed him
on how he would behave if he disagreed with one of the resulting
decisions. In matters pertaining to
the legality of the decision, he is obligated to intervene, but otherwise
it becomes a persuasion task; he avoids overruling the decisions of the
people to whom he has delegated in the interest of nurturing a system with
a distributed capacity for excellent decision making.
An expansive Wallace Foundation study devoted to examining the traits of effective school principals has found that high student achievement is linked to “collective leadership”: the combined influence of educators, parents, and others on school decisions.
- Distributing certain tasks or
functions within the organization: This third possibility, breaking
off discrete tasks in the interest of making administration a more
reasonable job, is exemplified in the many districts nationally who have
implemented Peer Assistance and Review Systems. The first such system was the Toledo
Plan, which dates back thirty years.
Evaluation and support of novice teachers as well as struggling
veterans, is turned over to teachers and their union. Involving teachers in the evaluation of
peers works because teachers are affected by the presence of ineffective
colleagues.
Allowing teachers, through their unions, to take charge of quality in the profession, has been shown in the research to elevate practice. When a consensus in the teaching community develops around practice, the union supports removal of non-performing individuals because teachers participated in the decision and the fairness of that decision cannot be impugned.
The conceptual difficulty for boards will be paying teachers for work that is not direct instruction of students.
In my Vermont experience,
evaluation is the piece of administration which gets short shrift. Administrators, even when they have the skill
set to do the job, do not have the time because of the myriad demands of the principalship. Administrators also often lack knowledge to
be genuinely helpful when evaluating teachers in specialized content
areas.
Breaking off this one piece and
handing it to teachers and their unions seems to me a first step towards
establishing a model of building and district administration that can actually
be accomplished by the real flesh and blood people to whom we entrust the task. But just a first step – ultimately resolving
the issue of rural administration may well require more radical solutions.
