Snowflake Schools

By James Crandell

Despite billions spent and countless reforms instigated, American schools seem perpetually mired in mediocrity. To change that, we don’t need top-down initiatives or experts lecturing; we must recognize the uniqueness of every school and turn to those who know their classrooms best—teachers.
Snowflake Schools analyzes the current educational system, explains why recent efforts at reform were doomed to fail, and outlines procedures that would change the fundamental culture of our schools to one where the creativity and individuality of teachers could act as the driving force for positive change.

Unlike other books on school reform written by theorists who don’t understand how schools really work, Snowflake Schools comes from someone who worked within the system for thirty-three years and strongly believes in the ideals of public education. James Crandell not only taught thousands of students, but worked closely with hundreds of administrators, school board members, and parents throughout his career. If our schools are to improve, we have to allow teaching artists to help our children reach collectively developed standards using the unique talents each teacher inherently possesses and has spent years cultivating. Administrative edicts, federal programs, and state mandates have failed and will continue to waste precious resources unless they are designed to utilize the insights of millions of hard-working classroom teachers. Snowflake Schools provides the blueprints for making that happen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Crandell
• Release date: Oct 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781310716768

James Crandell

James Crandell started his teaching career in 1979 after graduating from Illinois State University with a Bachelor’s degree in English education, getting his Master’s in 1989 from Northern Illinois University in Counseling Education. He was hired for his first teaching position in the Language Arts Department of F.E. Peacock Junior High School in Itasca, Illinois, where he taught three levels of eighth-grade English from 1979-1987. Upon “graduating” from junior high in 1987, he moved to the English Department of Hinsdale South High School in Darien, Illinois, working there for twenty-five years until his retirement in 2012 after thirty-three total years of teaching. At Hinsdale South, he taught freshmen (honors, regular, and basic), sophomores (basic), juniors (regular and basic), and seniors (Advanced Placement, expository writing, world literature, science fiction, creative writing, radio broadcasting, and mass media), as well as working in the department’s Writing Lab as a tutor for individual students. Crandell worked as a teacher advocate through the Itasca Education Association and the Hinsdale High School Teachers Association which were affiliated with the Illinois Education Association and the National Education Association. His positions included association president in both locals, grievance chair, vice president, chief spokesperson and negotiator during nine contract negotiations, in addition to editing newsletters for the two associations. He currently writes a blog for the Darien Patch and lives in Downers Grove, Illinois, with his wife, two daughters, and a Wheaten terrier.

Book preview

Snowflake Schools

Freeing Teachers to Improve Public Education

By James Crandell

Copyright 2013 James Crandell

Smashwords Edition

Cover Photography: Kerri Goodman

Students on cover: Leah Grace & Esther Crandell

Cover Design and Logos: Caligrpahics (http://www.caligraphics.net/joomla/)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Part One: Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Snowflake Teaching

Chapter 2: Too Much Volunteering

Chapter 3: Data, Schmata

Chapter 4: Creative Stupidity

Chapter 5: Public Education Can Be Saved

Part Two: Basic Issues for Teachers

Chapter 6: Grades

Chapter 7: Schedules and Preps

Chapter 8: Tracking

Chapter 9: Administrative Paperwork

Chapter 10: Grading Writing

Chapter 11: Textbooks

Chapter 12: Food Fight

Chapter 13: Student Monitors

Chapter 14: School Supplies

Chapter 15: Clothes Make the Teacher?

Chapter 16: Homework and Extra Help

Chapter 17: Extra-Curricular Activities

Chapter 18: Teacher Institutes

Chapter 19: Special Education

Chapter 20: Standardized Tests

Chapter 21: Teacher Pay

Chapter 22: Teacher Unions

Part Three: Administrators

Chapter 23: Administrative Ranks

Chapter 24: Administrative Decision Making

Chapter 25: Hiring and Firing

Chapter 26: Making Administrators Better

Chapter 27: Healthy Confrontation

Part Four: School Boards

Chapter 28: School Board Basics

Chapter 29: Special Interest Activists

Chapter 30: Super Teachers

Chapter 31: Financial Reactionaries

Chapter 32: Better School Boards

The End

Chapter 33: It Starts with a Snowflake and Ends with a Blizzard

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Introduction

For thirty-three years, I was part of the debate over improving education in America. Although ways to better our educational system don’t require exceptional insight, implementing those needed changes will be a never-ending challenge. This book, then, will lay out those challenges, review current practices and philosophies, and make suggestions for improvements. Briefly, my experience was as a classroom teacher: eight years in an elementary school district teaching eighth grade language arts and twenty-five years as a high school English teacher. Not only did I have over 3,000 students in my classes during that time, but I also had extensive experience as a teacher representative through my teachers’ union, serving in almost all capacities from president to grievance chair, and from newsletter editor to chief spokesperson representing over 300 teachers in contract negotiations. Thus, I worked with dozens of administrators and many school board members over the decades. In short, I’ve been around the educational track a few times.

Teaching is an art, not a science, so all efforts to objectify this subjective process will fail. What made my class effective wasn’t some technique or test to which I should teach; no, the most crucial element of any classroom is the teacher. What worked for my classroom wouldn’t necessarily transfer to anyone else’s because I couldn’t transfer to that classroom. Teachers need to learn as much as they can about teaching and then adapt, revise, and discard to create an environment based on the unique characteristics of each teacher.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore standards. Actually, we should be discussing those things important for our students to learn more often than we do. The problem with educational reform movements is that they focus mostly on outcomes determined by factual trivia measured with paper and pencil exams. Standardized tests are not the best way to assess student progress when the goal of school systems—students capable of lucid, insightful thinking and expression who have the ability to find, to evaluate, and to use information to enhance the foundation of knowledge they have already accumulated—can’t be evaluated well with objective tests. The bulk of teachers’ non-teaching time should be spent discussing what it is we want our students to be able to do instead of some expert lecturing us on how we should teach despite that expert’s not having spent any time in our classrooms. Teachers need a larger voice in education initiatives.

The current trend, however, is exactly the opposite. From the flawed No Child Left Behind to the gimmicky report cards used in many states, people who know little about teaching keep trying to dictate to and evaluate our schools. Not only is it absurd to think that any one program or set of statistics can impact every school, it’s futile to try to force independent, experienced teachers to conform to a one-size-fits-all approach. Once the bell rings and it’s just a teacher with her 25 students, we have little control over what happens, regardless of the latest trend. Whatever ideas or techniques come their way, good teachers will mold them to their own styles (if they use them at all), so including teachers as partners in the process is the only way reform movements will have any positive impact.

Once we accept the two basic concepts that there’s no one way to teach and that teachers need to be included at the inception of any education initiatives, we then have to figure out a way to unleash the collective brilliance of those teachers. I had dozens of ideas on how to make my school better as you will see in the forthcoming pages. And I’m hardly unusual in this regard as there are thousands of teachers across the country who could impact every problem any school is experiencing. The difficulty, then, is to find ways to get those ideas on the educational table so that we can check them out. The hierarchal nature of most school systems, unfortunately, has evolved into a Kafkaesque nightmare where practical ideas never get serious consideration as politicians pontificate, school boards posture, and administrators scurry for cover, all at the expense of student education. Teachers don’t care about differentiated accountability classifications or disaggregated data; they just want to help students learn. That they have to ask to be included in discussions on how to achieve this shows the dysfunction which has taken over many schools.

The most fundamental educational reform we could institute would be to foster methods for teachers to be the driving force in all reform movements. Until we do, we will continue to see program after program fail, but not before consuming enormous amounts of cash and time. Top-down mandates have little chance for success, but tapping the talent each school currently has on staff could improve every school in a year. Instead of an adversarial atmosphere where teachers are seen simply as technicians who have to be told what to do, we need an inclusive approach that recognizes there will be no progress without teachers who believe in what they’re doing. Creativity, cooperation, and respect will then take root in the system, leading to better schools. Contrast that with today’s accountability, standardization, and animosity, which have only led to wasted opportunities. This book will suggest common sense approaches which could lead us in a better direction.

Because each student goes through the public schools just once, we lose forever roughly one-twelfth of our opportunities each year when seniors graduate. And let’s not be overly pessimistic or melodramatic either: Most graduates benefit from their education and will do well as their lives progress, at least in part, because of public education as it now exists. It’s just that we could do so much better—not with some new program, test, or guru—but with a philosophical shift that would never fix public schools, instead creating an atmosphere of constructive energy, where all members of the system recognize their worth and feel respected by the process, where education matters more than test scores, and where teachers assume their rightful places as key components in improving our world. Not something we could measure with a multiple-choice exam or cost out, I realize—just much, much better for everyone.

Part I: Fundamentals

Chapter 1: Snowflake Teaching

As we’re early in what will be an on-going stream of ideas based on my experiences in public education, it’s important to understand some basic principles, the philosophical foundation for the specifics that will follow.

One of the first shifts needed in public education is how we perceive teachers.

Everyone’s an expert on teaching since everybody went to school, for at least ten and up to twenty-plus years. This expertise causes many problems for teachers because the reality is that you don’t know what it is to be a teacher unless you’ve been one. Married to one, daughter of two—it doesn’t matter how close your relationship is; after you’ve taught for five years, then we can talk.

It’s interesting: Most of us will admit that even though we’ve got a basic grasp of many jobs, a job like plumbing for example, we back off when it comes to telling a plumber how to do his job. Would you look over his shoulder as he works, suggesting that he use a different wrench or claim that you know the washer he’s holding will not work? We might argue that the bill is too much or that the job’s taking too long, but we leave him alone as he works. Many of us won’t do that when it comes to education. Teachers regularly have parents who are more than ready to explain to them what they are doing wrong: quick to offer suggestions on improvements, to advocate changes in curriculum, philosophy, grading, and approach—all of which, according to the parents, would make classes that much better for their children. The different roles that teachers and parents have in raising our young people lead to some interesting discussions (not to mention high-pitched shrieking), but the expertise factor makes our interactions even more challenging.

Because another job mercilessly second guessed by everybody is parenting. Again, we all have an opinion on that career path because all of us had and many are parents. Since what I do with my daughters is different than what you do with yours—and this is the crucial juncture for both teaching and parenting—we then leap to a fatal conclusion: One of us must be wrong. If you give your kids one hour of TV a day while I allow mine to choose how much they watch, either you are fascist control-freak or I am a permissive hippie dirt bag.

Typically, we have a hard time accepting the ambiguity of more than one right answer, or worse yet, no right answer at all. I don’t know about you, but I hate it when there isn’t one solution I’m sure is better than all the rest, but most of life is like this, right? You can’t be 100% sure that the new computer you bought, the medical treatment your doctor outlined, or the college your son selected is the best or right choice because there’s no way to know how the other choices you didn’t make would have turned out. That frustrating reality pushes us to work very hard in determining what the preeminent choices and correct answers are, whenever we think we can, since we slowly come to realize that much of our lives will be spent in the ambiguous gray zone where we’re never quite sure if we made the right choice.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that we want our educational system to be as black and white as we can. This desire, however, conflicts with a basic truth of teaching: There are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are teachers. Teaching is an art, not a science, and hence, we should stop trying to get teachers to be alike. What makes me a good or bad teacher has very little to do with the various techniques you’ll hear schools touting as somehow life-altering—whole language, back to basics, learning styles, multiple intelligences, and authentic assessment are just a few samples of the educational techniques and methods that have floated by in the last three decades. What really makes these concepts—all of which are motivated by positive intentions and based on interesting ideas—work or not work is the teacher. No matter how brilliant or useful something is, a tool is never any better than the fool operating it. A multi-media array of computers, projectors, and lasers that costs millions of dollars won’t have any impact if the person who makes the presentation doesn’t have anything to say. A single piece of chalk, on the other hand, can change the world if the person in front of that blackboard has vision.

A basic misdirection that educational systems take is the belief that we can crank out effective teachers the same way we crank out quality toothbrushes. This puts school administrators on the hunt for that holy grail of teaching techniques, the one that will transform every teacher in the school into a perfectly uniform product each of whom will function identically, producing perfectly uniform products. Of course, to achieve this educational utopia (?), we’ll need to spend billions on new technology, training, and consultants. Now, there is a great deal of money to be made in educational fads, but I’m naïve enough to believe that profit isn’t the sole (or even the main) motivation behind all this searching for a new technique that winds up being no better than the old. What I think is driving this quest is mostly the scientific approach to teaching continually rearing its totally objective head.

What I mean by that is the desire for a single, clear-cut method that guarantees the same results when it comes to standardized tests and other public relations issues, the right way. Schools have been under more and more scrutiny, largely thanks to state legislatures and national policies, in relation to their performance on standardized tests. It could be the Prairie State exam or the MAP tests or SAT or Advanced Placement; but whatever the measure, standardized tests seem to push people in the direction of—you guessed it—standardization. This is just one evil consequence of standardized testing, but it is the one nobody seems to acknowledge.

Essentially the mission of any school is to educate children, not an especially complicated concept; legislators, parents, and administrators know just why schools exist. However, the methods teachers use to achieve that education can be as different as their personalities; no, their methods have to be as diverse as their personalities, because their personality is their chief method. What made my class special had little to do with the technology or training I had. No, I must humbly point out that there was always one thing in my classroom that nobody else could replicate—me. My relationship with my students was the most essential, elemental characteristic of my class, and the methods I chose always reflected that truth.

Teachers should be compared to snowflakes (always unique), not replicable experiments, in order for them to achieve their purpose best. The irony of the pursuit of standardized teaching isn’t that it often fails, but that it can’t do anything but fail. By the time I had taken the technique apart and reassembled it in my own image (if I deigned to incorporate the practice du jours into my class at all), its creators probably wouldn’t even have recognized, much less approved of, how I made use of it. Notice that I’m focusing on how I would revise or reject any techniques forced upon me, but this was later in my career after many years of trial and error; new and younger teachers are much more susceptible to the fallacy that the latest fad being pushed by higher ups is somehow the answer to all educational ills, forcing them to throw away everything their personalities/instincts were telling them they should do in the classroom. New teachers are like saplings that bend and twist in order to get the most sunlight. In education, to non-tenured teachers especially, administrative approval shining down seems the surest way to safety and growth. Because that’s only half true (it can lead to safety), this approach stunts many teachers every year. The key concept we all need to recognize, however, is that teachers need the same freedom all of us need: the freedom to develop in ways that best suit our unique personalities and talents.

What Typically Happens

Currently, unfortunately, the attitude is to see teachers as cogs in a large machine who are in the classroom to follow a curriculum set by the state using the teaching techniques designated from above.

Let’s see how this works with the case of Nelly Naïve, a first-year teacher. She comes to her new high school anxious to make a difference and fearful that she won’t be able to. She has lots of ideas that make perfect sense to her; and if she were able to try them, she’d learn through experimentation those things which worked best with her talents and traits. But before she has the chance to get her mind on her first student, the New Teacher Orientation sucks her into a whirlpool of activity. This year, authentic assessment (or response to intervention or cooperative learning or differentiated instruction or…) is the concept which administrators, school boards, and/or state legislators are touting as the newest savior of education.

So for a full day or two, Nelly gets all kinds of workshops on the best way to teach her students. Never mind her own ideas or the can’t miss technique of last year; she needs to adapt all her lessons to incorporate this philosophy. Not only does she spend two days listening to some consultant who doesn’t work in the district and hasn’t taught in a high school for years (if ever), but her bosses make it clear that during the observations she will endure from September through February, they expect to see evidence of this approach in all her classes. Nelly, being the dutiful employee who wants to stay an employee, catches on quickly and tosses all her ideas into the trash to start making lesson plans based on the authentic assessment methodology. She doesn’t agree with all that she’s being told and secretly believes that her way of teaching would get better results, but the message is clear: If you want to work here for more than this year, we will see you use the authentic assessment approach as your primary teaching technique!

And so it goes; for Nelly’s four non-tenure years, she dutifully dumps all her approaches and suppresses her instincts in favor of the approach the system foists upon her. When she finally achieves the sanctity of tenure, she is so used to being told what to do that she no longer worries about how best to teach—when she needs to change her techniques to something new, the district will let her know. Instead of learning how to become the teaching artist she had the potential to be, she has devolved into a subservient instructional technician, adept in using many different styles, but never evolving her own; never being encouraged to find the keys to unlocking the unique skills that only she has; never becoming an inspiration to her students; never developing into a beacon of pedagogical light, always vaguely competent and totally pedestrian.

Now, that hypothetical example is the extreme case, but variations on that theme occur every year in most districts. A key philosophical problem school systems have is the belief that good teachers are replicable, that a single way of doing things can be useful and successful for everybody. That is simply not true. Don’t think that I am knocking the various techniques; they have some relevance and use to a certain percentage of teachers. We teachers need to be exposed to these ideas and encouraged to try them, should we feel that they might work. We should never, however, be forced to use anything that doesn’t make sense to us.

Snowflake Teachers

With the snowflake philosophy (the belief that no two teachers are exactly alike), all techniques would be welcome as long as the person using them felt that they were enhancing student learning. If I can use interpretative dance to teach geometric proofs effectively, if you find that sock puppets get your kids to write better, or if Nelly discovers her students achieve more in biology with finger painting than lectures; does it matter in the slightest as long as the students have learned what they were supposed to learn? The answer is no, obviously, but you would never think so based on the way most schools operate. Conformity, standardization, and my-way-or-the-highway are much more common than the snowflake approach; actually, I’ve never known any schools or administrative teams who adhere to this—a couple of department chairs are the only examples I was able to find over the years, and they constantly had to battle for independence whenever something new came along.

This is hard for me to understand since Snowflake (yes, this wonderful term does merit a capital letter) so clearly makes sense. If replication of a single technique guaranteed identical results, why does it matter who teaches at all? Shouldn’t some schmuck off the street be able to do exactly the same things with my classes after a couple of days of training as I could do after three decades of experience? Most of us don’t believe that, but we still have a hard time giving teachers the freedom to be themselves—as long as in doing so, they accomplish what they are supposed to accomplish.

This ability to express oneself in the classroom enriches schools in so many ways. Each teacher hired becomes a new personality to add to the interesting mix that already exists, not some piece of clay to be molded through heat and pressure into the same shape as all the other potted clones. Plus, by exposing students to the singular skills each teacher possesses, sooner or later, one of those teachers will make a significant connection with each kid. No, that’s not an absolute certainty, but the odds go way up with each teacher’s being encouraged to be him/herself, instead of an exact replica of this year’s model.

One of the overlooked realities of schools is that the success of students is correlated to their feelings about the place, whether or not they like going there. Not a particularly brilliant insight, but Snowflake makes it much more likely that more kids will like school. Sure, a certain type of student will flourish with the trend of the moment, but a much greater percentage won’t; and if that trend is all they get, how will those kids feel about school? In addition, teachers encouraged to work from their strengths will be more energetic and enthusiastic, infectious traits. It’s not the techniques, technology, or supplies that determine a quality classroom experience—it’s the teacher, pure and simple. Openly encouraged, Snowflake could make a significant positive contribution to schools everywhere without costing a dime; if anything, it would save money in that schools wouldn’t be lurching from fad to expensive fad at the drop of a consultant.

And understand that Snowflake is already firmly entrenched in schools, if only underground. Some of us are very good at working around the entrenched bureaucracy. Imagine the positive energy released, though, if teacher uniqueness and creativity were official policy! In my fantasy, an administrator would come up to me after watching me unsuccessfully trying to use the next big thing in education which the district was investigating. Jim, he would ruefully state, this (name of fad here) just doesn’t seem to make sense with the way you work best. I’d bag this one if I were you—you do much better without it. Sadly, however, more administrative evaluations focus on what the teacher did wrong in incorporating the latest: It’s not the technique that doesn’t work for the teacher; it’s the teacher who needs to change his way of doing things to utilize the new technique correctly. Now, Mr. Crandell, your introduction failed to establish the learning objectives for the lesson, not to mention your wait time between questions averaged two seconds too short. Finally, your closure didn’t fully review all the pertinent facts as they related to the observable behaviors as well as your expectations for the follow-up activities. And where the heck was the anticipatory set for tomorrow?

In isolation, neither teachers nor teaching techniques are necessarily good or bad; the appropriate analysis that should be taking place is how the style and innate abilities of each individual teacher match up with the techniques used in order to get the students to learn what they need to learn. To boil all of this down to its essence, one of the keys to making our schools better is recognizing that there are as many ways to be a good teacher as there are teachers. Make that the basis of teaching, and every school could improve almost immediately.

Chapter 2: Too Much Volunteering

I’m a strong advocate of neighborhood volunteering, so don’t take the title of this chapter the wrong way. When off work, people should find a way to give something back to the communities in which they live, be it helping out at the hospital, mentoring a troubled kid, or picking up trash in the park. What we’re analyzing here is the nature of a system that necessitates the individual to take the bulk of the initiative in volunteering for a committee, for advancement in a school system, or for serving on a school board.

Often, the most important decisions about a school’s direction are left to volunteer committees that require a good deal of work. The candidates for key administrative positions—such as the superintendent—who will greatly influence the make-up of the teaching staff and the school’s climate for everybody (students, teachers, and parents) are limited to those motivated to leave their current position. Realistically, job dissatisfaction is not the most important skill required for these challenging positions. School board members—a volunteer, unpaid position in most places—come from those motivated to run, and they are often not those most qualified or even interested in better schools. What happens in a school system, therefore, is left to the decisions of those least qualified to be objective about their own qualifications. There should be a better way.

Solicitation needs to supplement the volunteer mode for many of these processes. Who do the teachers think would be a good administrator? Are teachers ever asked? Wouldn’t you think the people most directly impacted by a committee’s recommendation, the teachers who will have to enforce the policy or use the new technology, should have some say on who is a part of that committee? Since teachers essentially run the schools, might they have some ideas on parents or community members who would be able and willing to take the time to learn to be a good school board member? Obviously, I think teacher recommendations should be a bigger part of the whole voluntary aspect of schools. The logic behind this is pretty clear: If you combine the experience and intelligence of the 50-1,000+ teachers on any given staff, won’t those insights be more astute most of the time than any single volunteer who thinks he is the right person for the job? We have all this first-hand knowledge available, so we need to take advantage of it more often.

Once this sage advice is gleaned, however, we need to make use of it. With committee work, somebody needs to ask the people who came up on the teacher-generated volunteer list to participate in that new committee. Every person on that list might say no, especially at first, since most of the committees with which I had experience were for display purposes only; the decisions they were supposed to be making had already been determined before the committees were even formed by the administrators who called for them. Nobody likes to waste his time, and the recommendations of many school committees are heeded only if those recommendations gibe with what the higher ups have already decided. But, if the right people are tapped (those independent and creative) and their recommendations are followed, soon the word will get out that the district is serious about getting the best decision based on what those who will have to carry out the decision think. Instead of going through the motions in order to be able to claim teachers had input in the outcome, committees need to value and use teacher ideas. Maybe we would soon have the atmosphere that encourages the right people to volunteer in the first place.

The same should be true for finding people to have the important titles in a school district. Principals, superintendents, and school board members should more often come from those with the most experience in a system and with the most respect of those they will lead. When it comes to administrators (department chairs, athletic directors, assistant principals, principals, assistant superintendents, and superintendents), almost all of them began their careers as teachers, and thus should understand the classroom perspective. That the vast majority I have encountered don’t speaks loudly to the kind of person who applies for administrative advancement. Simply, it’s usually the wrong people.

Since teachers see first-hand the kinds of compromises administrators have to make (or think they have to make) to keep all special interest groups happy, those satisfied in the classroom make the logical choice: If I stay where I am, I’ll be happy and productive since I regularly impact a significant percentage of the students lucky enough to have me each year. I understand how the system works, and I’m not willing to make all the compromises those guys have to make for a few bucks more a year. It’s just not worth it, even though I think I might be able to do a pretty good job.

Instead, we get the applicants with a completely different agenda: upward mobility, more money, more power, and less contact with students. Of course there are idealistic administrators out there who are motivated to do what’s best for students, but my experience with scores of administrators over the years would suggest that idealists aren’t the most common applicants. The rightness or wrongness of whatever issue they have to face is usually not the primary consideration, if it comes up at all. How much will any change in the status quo cost, how much work will the change entail, whose feathers will get ruffled with this choice, and how will the school board react are often more important than whether or not the matter being discussed will make the school better.

And the sad fact is that administrators need to think about all those other things if they want to keep their jobs. While most teachers are protected by collective bargaining laws and unions which means they have access to due process and just cause—legal terms that require certain procedures and proofs before any job action can be taken—administrators don’t have such protections and can be demoted at the drop of a contract. Usually they can’t be fired, but going from superintendent to math teacher rarely appeals to someone ambitious enough to have pursued a superintendency.

Despite their elevated status and compensation, administrators usually have much less security in their positions than teachers do, hence their slavish attention to the opinions of those above them, those who can make decisions about their employment futures. Me, once I got a job as an English teacher in 1979 and made tenure in 1981, I had reached the top of my field—and I rode that crest to retirement thirty-three years later.

There’s also past expertise issues. Since administrators were all once teachers, they certainly have first-hand knowledge of the job. However, the more time that has passed between when they actually taught and their having assumed an administrative position, the less they seem to understand what it’s like to be in the classroom. This is probably true of anyone who moves up the hierarchal ladder in any profession. You lose perspective on the daily issues of what you once did, you see your past performance as much better than it actually was, and you fail to comprehend the inevitable changes that current practitioners of your old job must face. In short, the longer it has been since the boss did the job he rose up from, the less capable he is to have any meaningful insight into what it takes to do his old job well. Show me an administrator who hasn’t been in the classroom for more than five years, and I’ll show you someone who can no longer understand what his teachers go through every day.

Now, my negativity toward administrators has little to do with these folks as individual people. I wouldn’t call them friends but it’s how they (are forced to?) do their jobs that gets me going. This isn’t about my personal vendetta against administrator X who did me dirt twenty years ago; no, my complaint here is about the combined works of anywhere from fifty to one hundred administrators with whom I’ve had the opportunity to work and to observe first hand. Most were decent human beings in the wrong job. (We’ll have additional insights on administrators in later chapters.) Administrators are much more important to the function and atmosphere of a school than most people comprehend, so it’s crucial you understand my bias is that most of them are mediocre to poor, and that the system for their advancement needs to be changed. That’s why we need better procedures for their selection.

The situation is even worse when it comes to school board members. Later, we’ll go over the main types of school board members we now get, but again, the misfits generally decide for themselves that they would be good for the job. How powerful would it be for someone to come to your door, telling you that your name had surfaced as someone who might be a wonderful school board candidate on a list generated by teachers and community members? Without a doubt, this kind of system would require more school/parent/community cooperation and communication, but given the high costs of education today, everyone would see much higher quality committee decisions, administrators, and school board members if we could get teachers’ input on who might do the best job and use those recommendations to fill our needs.

The laissez-faire approach to the formation of school committees, to the promotion of educational leaders, and to the selection of school board candidates needs to be revised. The self-selecting volunteer system we now use is dysfunctional at its core, and we have to find a better way. Involving teachers, who have the knowledge and expertise, in a way which recognizes their importance should be the first step in reducing the negative outcomes of our current process.

Chapter 3: Data, Schmata

I will express my disapproval of weighted grades in Chapter 6 (the practice of giving honors grades a higher value on a student’s grade point average than the same grade in an average class), and I regularly did the same during my thirty-three years of teaching. After I had written something negative about weighted grades in our teacher newsletter, one of my colleagues (we’ll call this person Pat) suggested that only a fool would rely on my kind of reasoning: Pat wrote me, In this district we have a saying when it comes to making school policy: ‘Trust in God, everybody else bring data.’ You have a lot of anecdotes and opinions, but no data. The data that weighted grades are a good thing for kids is overwhelming. Anyone interested in how this issue affects what is most important -- our kids -- should do a little ‘real’ research.

Well, despite the condescending tone (I must be either incompetent or lazy not to have found reams of overwhelming data.) and the emotional appeal (How could anyone question something that’s a good thing for kids?), I think that’s there’s something really important (and wrong) in this comment. The whole research-based best practices movement requires much more skepticism than we are currently affording it.

Let’s get some background out of the