What about the administrators?

A good friend of mine works in a public charter school in urban Connecticut.  While the name of the school escapes me, what does stick are the stories.  Test scores are low, violence and crime within the school building is up and students and some staff are apathetic, to say the very least.  Thought to be a highly progressive charter, the high hopes for success in this school are not coming to fruition.  Progress is not being made, and teachers and students are growing increasingly dissatisfied.  Most interesting, though, is that the school does not have a single administrator.  In fact, the school was established in a feeble attempt to prove that administrators are an unnecessary toxin.  The theory, however, has failed.

From Barack Obama to Andres Alonso, all we're hearing about is reform, reform, reform.  If the teacher is bad, find him or her a new profession.  If the students are not meeting standards, point to the person standing at the head of the classroom.  As a disclaimer, let me say that I am a firm believer in the theory that teacher actions are the number one influencer of student actions, and that, yes, if the test scores are low, then it is very likely the fault of the teacher leading, or for that matter not leading, the classroom.  However, so to play the role of the devil's advocate and spice up the conversation, I ask: what about the administrators? 

Of a group of teachers surveyed in one of my classes at Hopkins, an overwhelming, borderline alarming, number of "good teachers" departing the Baltimore City school system at the end of this school year are crediting a lack of administrative support for their reason for departure.  Where is the discussion about administrative reform?  If a classroom is successful because a teacher is a good leader of that classroom, wouldn't/shouldn't a school be equally successful under equally strong leadership?

Allow me to provide an example: I am a teacher in the Baltimore school system, and am in my, approximately, seventeenth month of teaching. Allow me to be the first to say that I still have a LOT to learn.  I welcome observations, and have, on multiple occasions invited any one of the four vice principals, the resident principal and principal, into my classroom to both see the great things happening, but also offer constructive feedback so to improve my performance.  Never has an invitation been answered, which I have simply assumed is because their schedules are too busy to accommodate a pop in, and that is fine.  But, for my formal observation this spring - one of two scheduled opportunities to rate and officially document my performance - according to district expectations, I am to have a pre-observation meeting, an observation of my teaching and a post-observation debrief and strategizing session.  Last week, as assistant principal walked into my room at 2:55 pm, minutes before the final bell was to ring and in the middle of the closing of my lesson, to tell me that she "knows what you're capable of based on what I've seen you do in the classroom before, so you don't have to worry about any of that pre or post observation stuff. I'll just drop in for a few minutes for the actual observation."

She's never seen me teach before. Ever.... ev-ver. But, she's charged with the responsibility of providing me a comprehensive and accurate rating of my teaching performance?  I would think that me, a teacher of less than two years, would be prioritized and taken through this observation cycle to provide me with the feedback necessary to develop me into one of these "good enough" teachers we hear so frequently are needed in our failing schools. Quite honestly, I could be a miserable teacher who puts on a good show for observation day and has students who like me enough to not say anything about it.  I bet that, based on this skimpy (dare I call it..) "formal observation", I would be rehired to teach next year - my third year - therefore guaranteeing me tenure and virtually never fire-able. Isn't that exactly the problem?  Bring on the firing squad - MAKE me prove that I'm good enough.

In an OpEd posted on the New York Times site, Nicholas Kristof calls Michelle Rhee's takeover of the DC school system "education's ground zero".  He cautiously praises her for her firm stance on the educational platforms on which she stands on difficult issues, like incentive pay for teacher.  But, in the discussion about incentive pay, Kristof writes, "But teachers worry, not unreasonably, that their performance is difficult to measure, that they will be judged by incompetent principals."  I ask, then, where is the discussion about reforming school leadership? Isn't it time that weak leaders be made aware that their performance is under the public microscope, too?