Who's In Charge of Your Kid's School?

Spring is the time for school hiring. Teachers and administrators look for greener pastures and are lured away by other districts. A spate of recent administrator hirings locally reflects one of the grand problems in education: treating schools like private fiefdoms. There is a tendency when we're empowered to hire new staff to get a bit self-absorbed, seeking the people we want to work with, people who will be loyal to us and who we'd enjoy spending the day with.  People who won't challenge our decisions.  People whose support we can count on.  People who think about their careers first.

I realize this is not a problem unique to education. Similar charges have been leveled against presidents as well, that they fill their cabinets with yes-men. The private sector has the same core problem.  But as public servants, we have an obligation to make selections not for our own benefit but for the best outcomes for our clients, the kids. When we hire administrators, we set the course for future teacher selections as well. Often the same biases we show in selecting principals ripple down to which teachers end up in our classrooms.

Teacher quality is only as good as the hiring process that chooses them, as I outlined in Wrong Focus.  Several recent commentators have noted that teachers are often chosen from the bottom half of college graduates whereas in other countries the teaching ranks are full of the universities' A teams. Colleges have been blamed for this phenomenon and are urged to be more selective in who they accept into education cohorts. But colleges can pre-select candidates and find that school districts won't hire them. Few school administrators give any weight at all to college transcripts. Was the applicant a top or bottom tier student? Who cares. How many times have I heard that teachers who were A students don't understand kids who struggle. There's a reality in education hiring that lands at the central office or principal's door, not the colleges'.

There are phenomenal educators to be found. But good-old-boy administrators don't find them.  Often, they don't even recognize them. The likable, easy-going, personable and career-focused men (not always men, but often) who populate school administrations around the country fall short.  If you weren't a top academician, you don't value that in your hires. If you played sports, you connect best with others who did. If you enjoy pressing the flesh more than dealing with conflict, you'll avoid the hard stuff.

A recent Harvard study looked at the gender and racial makeup of school superintendents. And additional research has shown that women and minorities -- if hired at all -- are more likely to be challenged and removed by elected school boards.

The nation's 14,000-odd district superintendents are overwhelmingly white and male. The most recent data from the American Association of School Administrators show that in 2000, 15 percent of superintendents were women and 5 percent were members of racial or ethnic minorities of either sex.

We need school administrators who are passionate first about education and the children they work for. We need administrators who read and study and can critically evaluate the latest trends, whether a new teaching methodology, a new school structure or technology marketed to classrooms. We need administrators who ask more questions and come to their work analytically.  We need courageous principals and superintendents who may not like making unpopular decisions, but will do so if that's what's right for their schools. We need people who are sometimes controversial but always able to identify the grand principles that guide them.

But that's rarely what we get. And sadly, when administrators are chosen for the wrong reasons, they choose teachers who reflect their own values.

Challenging the status quo takes courage and is a career risk. But if we're serious about improving schools, it has to start with the choices we make in the spring.

See also: Wrong Focus

The Successful Administrator

All I Needed to Know, I Learned from Kids

Teaching is Hard

This past term, I taught a college history course.  It was my first college teaching experience, following  many years as a high school teacher and administrator. I admit it was quite fun -- college students can be a kick. It was also a tremendous amount of work to make each class session as valuable as possible.  I spent about twelve hours for each class session, 250 hours of work for my $2000 paycheck.  Just shy of minimum wage.

I was reminded how difficult teaching is, especially good teaching. I last taught (not counting conference presentations, staff development and occasional drop-in lessons) in 1993. That's twenty years ago. Since then I've been an administrator, hiring, guiding and evaluating other teachers, full of suggestions to make their classrooms more engaged, the learning more universal and the interactions more focused. I've mentored many a teacher from my perch in the principal's office.

Ridiculous. I failed to do several of the things I insisted my own teachers do: checking for understanding, not allowing the most vocal to dominate discussions, and scheduling frequent informal assessments. The students told me it was a good class, that they learned a lot and were engaged.  They liked the activities, the discussions and the emphasis on how history informs current issues. Nice, but not good enough.  A few of my students were still overwhelmed by the pacing and rigor of the course.

The critics who rail about "failing teachers" and "failing schools" have no idea how difficult the work is. We praise soldiers knowing the difficulties they face.  We support our police officers and fire fighters and appreciate the work they do on our behalf. We defend the office of the president in spite of disappointments because we know it must be a tough job. Surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, scientists, engineers and mathematicians are revered.  After all, their jobs are hard, really hard.

I remember teaching now. It's hard too. Really hard.

The next time you read some pundit talking about "good teachers" and "bad teachers", look for their description of what each does.  Ask yourself what exactly they are doing differently.  Odds are, neither you nor the pundit can clearly describe what "good teaching" entails.  It's not a recipe you follow. If it were, we could all do it perfectly.

Yes, I have seen excellent teachers and a few fairly worthless ones.  The worthless ones shared one quality: laziness. They were the ones who tried to do the job in just forty hours a week. Can't be done with any quality.

Go hug a teacher.  Now, before you forget and read another article from Bill Gates, Students Matter or Michelle Rhee slamming the profession.

Why Teens Should not Work

That first job is akin to becoming an adult.  Both teens and their parents look forward to the day Junior is driving off to work instead of hanging around the house.  And landing a paying job is the ticket to that other rite of passage, owning your first set of wheels.

Learning responsibility, dependability, managing money and work ethics are values of early job experiences.  But the emphasis on school-to-work in the past twenty years has its downside as well.  Very few teens land jobs with skills relevant to their career aspirations. Teen workers are motivated not by the career-developing skills they could acquire, but rather by the disposable cash in their pockets.

That disposable income is a distraction, and a dangerous one for many teens.  Most high school students spend their money on clothes, cars and entertainment.  Few use their earnings to contribute to household expenses and very little is put aside for college.  While their parents may have little left over once the bills are paid, teen workers enjoy higher disposable income than their parents, higher in fact than they can expect during most of their adult lives.

Imagine giving up hundreds of dollars in disposable income -- money for car payments, gas, and insurance but also for clothes, expensive shoes, music and video games.  Imagine trading all that in for four years of pauperhood in college: no car, no money, no new clothes, no pizza, no jingle jangle in your pocket.

And financial aid? If a student worked for pay the year before applying, the folks who calculate his eligibility assume he's saved every penny for college -- pennies he's expected to contribute and that reduce his financial aid eligibility.

Research tells us that for too many teens, an after school job means less likelihood of enrolling in college or finishing once there.

In research conducted over 20 years, students who worked more than 15 hours per week had lower grades, did less homework, had higher dropout rates and were less likely to go to college than students who worked under 15 hours per week. 1997 study by the National Research Center for Vocational Education at the University of California, Berkeley (Source)

The typical senior in high school works 17 hours per week and two-thirds of high school students ages 16 and older have held jobs.  The data however is interesting.

42% of all 16 and 17-year olds held after school jobs
45% of boys worked, while just 38% of girls did
White students (50%) were twice as likely to work after school as black and Hispanic students (both at 24%).
Students from poor families were less likely to hold after school jobs than middle class teens and students whose parents attended college were more likely to work after school. (Source)

The research indicates there may be some minor benefits to working less than 10 hours per week but those quickly turn to negatives as the hours increase.

Teens who work more than 20 hours per week are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, less likely to complete their homework, and have lower grades and poorer attendance (Source).  Any high school teacher can tell stories about students who can't stay awake in class because of their late work hours.  And extracurricular activities -- which have been shown to enhance students' grades, graduation rates and chances of going to college -- are out of reach for those with after school jobs.

It's hard to look at your seemingly unambitious, irresponsible offspring and not think the discipline of going to work would be good for him.  But the research shows that for long-term benefits -- more engagement in school, choosing more rigorous coursework, graduating on time and choosing college after graduation -- a job is more likely a deterrent.  He'll have 40 years or more of work ahead of him.  Right now his job is school.

See also:  The Non-Curriculum

College is the Only Answer

Rethinking a 100 Year Old Experiment