Principals, principles and the press.
For this month, editors at the Harvard Education Letter have kindly removed the paywall on this interview with me. In it, I give advice to school and district administrators about dealing with the press. Not surprisingly, I advocate for openness, but I think I make a good case—so pass this along to the people you cover, and maybe it will give them pause about shutting you out.
posted by Linda Perlstein at
10:05 AM
2 Comments:
You hit on the two biggest issues in schools that we have the power to address..
Firstly, you are right that “The prime directive from principals and administrators in schools and in education right now is to be a “team player,” but oftentimes “team player” is taken to mean, “Do what we say and don’t question it.”“
And if there is the single biggest specific issue where “team players” should be allowed to speak honestly you nail it here:
“‘Here’s what we’ve been doing to try to get kids in school every day, but we had 10 percent of our students absent 20 days last semester and we aren’t sure what we are going to do about it.’” These are not excuses, but explanations.”
Not being able to pass honest infrmation up the chain of command, and to the community, regarding attendance is the foundation of the other credibility gaps. Its leads to the gag rule regarding discipline. I gets to the inherent flaws of top down curriculum pacing that creates skin-deep teaching and learning. It perpetuates the myth that after-school remediation can work in the toughest schools. It kills honest discussions regarding teacher quality and how it should be addressed, and undercuts efforts to use data to help kids (like fighting truancy) as opposed to punishing adults.
But administrators can’t allow absenteeism to be discussed for fear that it is “making excuses” and blaming families. Tragically, if we had a real discussion of absenteeism, including the causes of absenteeism, it would open the eyes of more educators about the challenges faced within families. (And I’d bet that heart disease and cancer, not alcoholism and drugs, are the single biggest reasons for under-performance) If we had an honest discussion of absenteeism, then we might look back and joke, “what if we had a blame game, and nobody came? Then we could address the complexity of the educational problems in our diverse system.
Which gets us back to your first point about team players. Notice the irony of the fillmaker who made An Inconvenient Truth endorsing “reformers” who want litmus tests to create educational monocultures.
Traditionally teachers have had good job security so I could never understand "the culture of fear," but it definitely exists. For some reason, I was never afraid to speak up, and for that reason administrators were afraid of ME.
The trick was to "talk" to people outside of the district, such as parents, reporters, politicians and agencies of the state and federal governments. Once I had a great letter to the editor (criticizing a disrespectful board member) and actually won a prize for the best letter of the year! Of course, none of that would have been possible without due process.
One of the primary reasons we are having the current problems in education is the fact that teachers do not speak up nearly as much as they should. Much of the public just doesn't know what is going on in our schools.
Post a Comment
Considerate comments are welcome. Uncivil remarks will be deleted. Anonymous comments -- including those unaccompanied by the author's first and last name -- are not permitted.
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home