Tag Archives: schools

Being A Public Secondary School Principal Is Not For The Weak Of Heart

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Or anyone lacking superhuman interpersonal skills.

Jessica Winters’s story in The NewYorker titled ” The Meltdown of a Middle School in a Liberal Town” (April 3, 2024) left me wondering how a school district starts over. It’s a case study of things completely falling apart in an Amherst, Massachusetts public middle school. It features angry parents, school personnel ignoring the separation of church and state, educators wholly unprepared to work with trans students, cultural conflicts of all sorts, and many other layers of public school dysfunction.

Today there’s a similarly harrowing story in The New York Times, titled, “A Principal Confronted a Teenage Girl. Now He’s Facing Prison Time.”

The heart of the matter:

“For educators everywhere, the criminal prosecution of Mr. Sanchez for an action that schools typically handle using their own disciplinary codes opens up new levels of potential risk. Fights are part of high school life. If a school official can be not just disciplined but also jailed for intervening to break up or prevent a fight, what are teachers supposed to do?

In an interview, Mr. Sanchez mentioned a fight last year in which a teacher told the students to stop but did not physically separate them. ‘And the parent was just so upset when they saw the video, like, ‘Why isn’t this person stopping it?’’ he said. ‘And to be honest, I was a little upset, too. I didn’t say that to the parent, but I did say, ‘Well, because sometimes people are worried about liability.’”

Recently, I did a writing workshop with fifteen K-12 teachers who are seeking school principal certification. More specifically, they were applying for grants that provide them substitutes for their classrooms so they can get the required hours interning as administrators-to-be.

Impressive group, but after reflecting on these stories, I can’t help but wonder if they know what they’re committing to. The numerous simultaneous challenges they will soon face. The public’s anger and disregard for one another. The tenuousness of the public commons. The toll it will take on them and their families.

My guess is not entirely, because if they did, they’d probably choose professional paths where mere mortals stand much better odds of succeeding.

Paragraph To Ponder

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“Today the teacher who digresses is frowned upon; everything in a lesson is supposed to move toward a specific measurable goal. Teachers are supposed to announce the objective at the start of the lesson, remind students of the objective throughout the lesson, and demonstrate attainment of the objective at the end. Such a utilitarian view of education has a long history, but in recent years it has overtaken education discourse. It can be attributed to the introduction of business language and models into education, and the resultant streamlining of language. Schools and industries have become less concerned with the possible meanings of words, their allusions and nuances, than with buzzwords that proclaim to funders and inspectors that the approved things are being done—goal setting, ‘targeted’ professional development, identification of ‘best practices,’ and so forth. Thus we lose the means to question and criticize the narrow conceptions of success that have so much power in our lives.”

Diana Senechal, Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture, 2012.

Every Team is Better and Worse Off Because You’re On It

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Atul Gawande, one of my favorite authors, is about to gain a wider audience through this new book that will do very well.

His New Yorker essay, Cowboys and Pit Crews, got me thinking about how we live our lives on a never ending series of teams whether grade school classrooms, athletic teams, art and music based teams, community groups, home owners associations, church councils, families, school faculties, work teams, book clubs, special interest groups, political campaigns, boards of directors, etc.

You would never guess that if your only frame of reference was elementary, secondary, and higher education classrooms in the United States. Students almost always work on things individually and faculty almost always assess students individually. Sure, sometimes students work in small groups, but they’re not taught to be thoughtful observers of small group dynamics. It’s rare that they’re ever asked why some small groups work well and others don’t. Too often, teachers wrongly assume students already know how to be good teammates. As a result, students tend to be clueless about group dynamics.

And since teamwork doesn’t factor into student evaluations, they’re even less self aware of their team-based strengths and weaknesses. They’re hardly ever asked the most basic group process related questions such as, “What do you do well as a team member? What’s most challenging for you when working closely with others? Where could you improve?”

Every person, you included, has specific skills, knowledge, and personal attributes that benefit and hamper all of the teams they are on at any one time. Which of your skills, knowledge, and personal attributes do your team’s often use to positive advantage? And how does your presence on teams sometimes limit their effectiveness? What could you do better as a teammate?

Aren’t sure how to answer those questions? Welcome to the “Almost Everybody” Club. It’s not your fault. Individualism is so pervasive in American life, schools think about students as cowboys  and cowgirls despite the fact they’ll live their lives on pit crew after pit crew.