Most school improvement programs today
require school principals to become “instructional leaders.”
This is quite a shift from traditional expectations for rural
superintendents and building principals.
Before the No Child Left Behind Act
was passed and signed into law by President George Bush, K-12 school
leaders across the nation spent most of their time satisfying
parents' concerns about school logistics and school discipline.
Over the years, I've seen principals
and small town superintendents work ungodly hours just dealing with
beans, balls, buses and behavior issues.
These leaders were successful most of
the time because they treated their teachers as professionals, and
they saw themselves as agents who gathered resources and ran school
logistics in such a manner that teachers could easily and
independently plan and deliver instruction consistent with state
academic standards.
When NCLB became law, there was a lot
of resistance to the idea that school administrators had to become
instructional leaders. I've heard many a superintendent and
principal insist that they had no time to be Chief Educator. To keep
their jobs, they had to spend most of their time satisfying parental
concerns about beans, balls, buses, and behavior. Their tenure
depended on the satisfaction of parents and school board members,
based on their overall management of cafeteria, sports,
transportation, and school discipline issues.
But, the paradigm shift is not at all a
bad idea. It's just badly implemented most of the time, because
public schools rarely have the financial resources to expand their
administrations to invest in instructional leadership at the building
or school district level.
The State of Louisiana Board of
Education, for example, implemented rigid policies about how teachers
should teach, with the expectation that classroom instruction would
flow the same way in every classroom regardless of subject, student
ability, or access to textbooks and computers. Every classroom,
every student should look, act, and perform the same way, as if
teachers were packaging McDonald's Hamburgers rather than developing
the minds and hearts of children.
And, now, using the “Compass”
evaluation system, Louisiana has completely undermined the value of
instructional leadership, as it was intended to push our schools to
higher levels of achievement.
Under “Compass,” principals are
supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher
effectiveness if they notice any deviation from the teaching formula
that our State Superintendent of Education now requires of all
teachers – whether or not the deviation produced better learning in
the classroom.
The Compass system encourages
principals to downgrade teachers if they engage in direct instruction
– even when research shows that at-risk students make greater
achievement gains when teachers use direct instruction methods.
Under “Compass,” principals are
supposed to walk around with their clipboards, and downgrade teacher
effectiveness if they notice that a teacher is not using technology –
whether or not the school provides the teacher with technology.
Even when teachers produce high levels
of achievement in their students, our state education superintendent
has instructed principals to still downgrade teacher evaluations, on
the bizarre theory that teachers will work harder if you devalue
their accomplishments.
Sadly, there are a few school
administrators in Louisiana who have embraced this negative
instruction leader model, because their own evaluations now depend on
compliance with the Compass System. Is it any wonder that school
teachers are leaving the profession they love in droves?
At the outset of NCLB, there was much
discussion about whether or not schools needed to have larger
administrative staffs in order to accomplish this major shift of
responsibilities for top administrators. Other industries have much smaller
supervisor to staff ratios, the reasoning went. So, if we really
wanted to improve classroom instruction, we needed to reduce the
number of teachers each principal supervises, to make it possible for
principals to more closely monitor their teachers.
My own dissertation results showed an
inverse correlation between the amount of money spent on
administration – the more more money spent on administration, the
lower the math and reading scores. Conversely, the more money that
was spent inside the classroom, the higher the achievement.
Of course, money spent in the classroom
needs to be spent wisely on instruction materials, smaller class
sizes, highly-trained, certified teachers and student support
systems.
Since the Compass evaluation system was
implemented under Superintendent John White, Louisiana's teaching
profession is being reduced to a cookie cutter recipe of behaviors
that are not based in research, history, psychology, or best
practices. Rather than providing instructional leadership, White
expects principals to monitor superficial behaviors of teachers and
students, with the expectation that both will move and act with
robotic precision.
Our children and our schools performed
much better when our teachers were permitted to act as professionals.
Until Louisiana's administrators are allowed to be positive
instructional leaders to their team of professional, certified
teachers, it may be best for administrators to focus on what they do
best: keep everybody happy with a steady flow of beans, balls,buses,
and behavioral interventions.
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