THE PUBLIC SCHOOL

There is a certain amount of fear, or caution or reflectiveness about role expectations and the roles that other have in schools everywhere. Principals are responsible and accountable for each teacher's effectiveness, for motivating and inspiring the faculty, as well as the students. The Principalship is the key position but it is interconnected with all the other key roles, but leadership should not be put on the classroom teacher. Teachers are teaching in classrooms; Principals are floating free without assigned duties other than the expectation of Leadership.

The School Board does the hiring (and firing) of all school workers, including the Principle and Teachers. So, this group has a great deal of power. They can be too active or not active enough, and they can be held accountable by the parents and by State officials. So, although School Board members are not usually paid much for their work in this capacity, it is a privilege and very powerful. I would think that ultimately teachers are more concerned about their School Board's opinion, but the Supt. and Principle are connected in the accountability playbook which can be very political.

The organization of school is complex and should be examined much more carefully. The assumption that teachers are only teaching is wrong. At least 1/3 of every faculty group have quasi-Administrative position, or sports coaching positions. These quasi-administrative positions are more important than the teaching duties because they involve all of the administrative tasks necessary for organizing the operations of the schools: Programming, Deans, Student Activities Coordinator, Attendance Coordinator, Parent Coordinator, Testing Coordinator, and then there are the coaches – a typical public school has as many as 26 teams per school year! The Principle assigns these duties and in doing so gathers around a politically more stable group of teachers than the rest of the faculty many of whom are more pro-active with the Union which is a source of tension!

I think, and always thought, that by doing the best I could I would be esteemed in the eyes of all of the other roles in the educational maze, including other teachers. But, I found that the central problems I had were with other teachers, then other school workers, and then the students. I only had problems with administrators a few times. Doing the job and expecting cooperation from other workers was what I found troubling.  For example, turnover of faculty members and other school workers, like security, was always high for reasons of consistent attendance and appropriate rigor in the classroom. My feelings were that most other teachers settled for babysitting the students instead of actually teaching. Security was frequently absent and not effective.

By teaching I mean: presenting new information, as per State Standards and department curriculum. The problem was (is) free riding. One teacher, like myself, works hard to get the students to work and learn by presenting interesting lessons, while other teachers are lackadaisical - they did not press the State Standards and implemented the curriculum only partially and often poorly. A good example was the lack of technology in the classroom although it was available - not necessarily the Smartboard, but the overhead and the data projector were rarely used but you would never see a college classroom of worth without them.  I was disappointed in other teachers who failed their students at abnormally high rates which I think indicated a bias. The students seemed to understand that the deck was stacked against them by the teachers who were organized tacitly to issue the 55 failing grade en masse regardless of behavior, cooperation or effort; their only consideration was the test score, and then these same teachers cried when the State came in with the Value-Added teacher evaluation form. 

Good classroom management and student motivation is a function of parents, teachers, other school personnel, the administrators and other community workers, including the politicians and the press. But most of these other positions put the onus on the classroom teacher which I think is unfair. Proper socialization of children involves more people than teachers in classrooms.  Students begin very young in schools and if they are properly taught and not permitted to give up, to learn that the system is against them, they should be achieving good grades and learning interesting things throughout their school careers. But, peer relations are often unsupervised and treacherous; teachers and parents often unwittingly escalate the tension of the peer hierarchy by their many unconscious preferences and biases.

The students soon learn that grades are based on "liking" regardless of effort or test scores. There are other obstacles for students: parental investment and expectations for their children in school are usually poor, losing control of their children at a young age, approving of extracurriculars (sports) over school grades, and generally having a negative valuation of the school system - few parents attend parent-teacher conferences which are few and far between and few parents make an intervention in the homework or attitude of their children. Parents seem anti-school as per their memory of the teachers! Coursework is not important to them, they do not take it seriously, they do not do the homework, and they have to be monitored just to pay attention. Interruptions are frequent!

Superintendent presence and influence is entirely lacking. Union representatives are much more available. Anything that goes by the nominal STATE is a rare factor. At best, the Superintendent impacts the school by budgetary control which only pertains to the Principle role. Accountability evaluations are conducted by State Education Department agencies beyond the Supt - it was always unclear to me what the impact of the Supt was other than oversight on crises. For example, Bloomburg reorganized the administrative structure of NYC Education twice through major reforms. All the confusion was completely oblivious to anyone in the schools - no one knew what was going on but it was expensive - except that Mayor Bloomburg DAILY issued completely nonspecific negative statements in the local press against the Teachers for over 10 years!!

The problems of schooling are complex. It is great when a faculty is cooperative and coordinated - when there a few superstars and a few movers-and-shakers; it is terrible when the administration and certain 'heavy' teachers collude to dumb down the entire process and accept high failing rates and student misbehavior or non-achievement without a word of critical discussion. A good example is the recent questioning of the Bachelor’s Degree in college where adolescents spend 4 years or more to earn the BA but do they learn anything?   How rigorous are the college courses? How seriously do the students take them? This differential attitude can be seen in the difference that people attribute to the prestigious schools as contrasted to the State Universities and many other colleges who hire adjunct faculty at a rate of 75% of the faculty. Does anyone believe that adjuncts who are barely getting paid at the poverty limit for a full load of college coursework are providing the kind of inspiration and rigor that is equivalent at the prestigious colleges?

The attitude toward the teacher in the US is highly ambivalent - even teachers are ambivalent (think love-hate or S&M) towards themselves and other teachers. A good example of this is the number of teachers who actually retire with a pension, who teach for 30 good years and are older than 62. In NYC, there are over 120,000 teachers who go to work in the schools every day, there are less than 100,000 teachers earning the full pension!! Teachers frequently quit! That should tell you something about the attitude toward the teacher - it is poor and it is negative. Administrators have a negative attitude towards teachers, so do parents, so do students, so do other teachers. Often, it is just a question of getting an adult in the room. Here in PA, I watch judges speak to Superintendents about class coverage - the Superintendents advertise at $200/day for substitutes (same as NYC) and still can't fill the need!

Along with the attitude toward the teacher goes the attitude towards reading and writing, the attitudes are negative. Learning to write script often does not even occur in the schools today. Writing an essay - without plagiarizing by any watered-down standard - is rarely even assigned much less completed. Students have to read their texts in the classroom because they do not or cannot read anywhere else. There is a major shutdown of reading in the US while publishers are pumping out the books from the upper strata of professional writers. If you peruse social media, the best you will find are one sentence responses if that, even our President-elect tweets which limits statements to 140 characters, barely 20 words!

This is the reason why the charter school movement, the public funding of private schools, and the extension of State-run education into the undergraduate programs is underway.  The US. and the world, has gone from a situation where education was either nonexistent or rare beyond the 8th grade up to WWII for most of the population, only the upper classes receiving a complete high school education or a college education, to a situation where the population is doubled, the expectations for a proper education the BA, and a national school system that has barely expanded by 25% the necessary space needed, or the higher education programs for teacher education. Higher Education in the US is too small to accommodate the needed professional cadre of faculty and administrators for the US population. The drumbeat of family, marriage and reproduction, hits the wall of housing and quality schools like a tractor-trailer into a speeding train!  You can only take what is offered: the overworked underpaid 3rd career teachers who often cannot even afford a computer!, the $15.00/hr. security, and the class size limitations at 34 - the room is packed!