Sunday, September 7, 2014

The Four B's of School Leadership: My Sunday Eunice News Column for September 7, 2014

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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