Mental Mutilation, Part 4: Principals and the Flaming Hoops

The casual observer could be forgiven for believing that public education’s goals more closely represent a circus than an earnest pursuit of growth and learning. Each player on the education stage has an elaborately choreographed role that calls for performance for performance’s sake.

The students, of course, carry the bulk of this responsibility, memorizing a routine of answers to be performed on cue for statewide aptitude testing. Teachers play the role of lion tamer in this burlesque, establishing rigid, unimaginative curriculum designed to maximize the school’s ability to deliver positive test scores. Finally, administrators like school principals are tasked with the role of ring master in these proceedings, made responsible for herding dozens of teachers and thousands of students toward some vague higher standard.

Putting aside the farce that is education tailor-made for test taking rather than genuine learning, there’s a story here in the impossible situation created for principals.

Monday morning, NPR ran a piece about the role of a principal as a school CEO. Districts look toward principals as standard bearers responsible for reducing school violence, for inspiring teachers and for innovating policy — and, correspondingly, for improving standardized test scores.

But this is a dreadful position to be in as a principal. The chief responsibility of a leader is people. Having the right people doing the right thing in the right place. More than ever, this is an exceedingly difficult proposition in public education. A principal isn’t empowered to “clean out the dead wood,” since teacher’s unions and district policies have mistaken public education for a government-subsidized jobs program. Inept teachers can’t be removed — merely shuffled around. In addition to being unable remove non-performers, a principal conversely cannot do all that much to reward high achievers. Benefits packages and compensation are inflexible realities established at higher echelons than where these putative “school CEOs” sit. Finally, even the most inspirational of generals would be hard-pressed to motivate troops as besieged as a legion of public educators. These are smart, educated individuals who know how to do math. They can see that their classrooms are over-filled, that their resources are limited and frequently out-of-date, that their students are less and less inclined to play the education game.

You want violence in schools to be reduced? It’s going to take more than clever leader at the helm. Students need a proper reason for attending school. Weekly rehearsal for the choreographed performance piece of standardized testing will not pass muster. You want the best and brightest contributing to the education of our young minds? You’ll need to do better than an empty suit pretending to be an executive even as a 10-year-old paint job peels around him. Educators need a mission they can believe in. They need resources to discharge that mission while also being able to pay their bills and live to standards befitting their hard work and contributions to the betterment of our world.

It sounds like a tall order because it’s the biggest public policy challenge in the history of our nation. So far it goes unanswered. But these reforms are essential to the survival of the next generation of Americans in an unforgiving, knowledge-driven global economy.

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