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Who’s Minding the School?

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Staff

By Steve Peha

Do you ever wonder who really runs a given school or district? I do. And I’m in them all the time. For all the sound and fury of testing and standards, what we have achieved is an ineffective accountability system that is at best a pale form of collective wrist slapping, where entire schools must fail for many years before any action is taken — and even then, this action rarely addresses the root causes of failure.

When most people think of accountability in the workplace, I believe they think of personal accountability: How well do I do my job? What does my boss think? What are my responsibilities and how effectively do I deal with them?

But this is not the way it is in the culture of most public school systems.

At the top of the food chain, we often find a superintendent who makes few public statements, rarely takes specific positions on important issues, sets few if any goals and generally leaves the administrative workings of the district to others in the district office.

For their part, assistant superintendents, some of whom have direct management responsibility for principals, also engage in a fair amount of reverse buck passing. Other than “get those test scores up,” meaningful oversight of principals is often minimal.

In many schools where I have worked, principals are typically on their own to do more or less what they want. As long as suspensions are low and teacher grievances even lower, principals often are given wide latitude as to how they run their buildings. Sadly, most fail to take advantage of that to their students’ advantage.

With direct oversight of teachers, principals are the critical fulcrum point in the system. Principals with the skill and the will to make substantive changes can quickly turn around failing schools. But without meaningful personal accountability to their superiors, few principals feel it is worth the risk of upsetting a teacher (or a powerful parent) to do what needs to be done.

For example, most of the principals with whom I’ve met privately express significant reluctance to observe teachers in their classrooms. Even something as harmless as walking down the hallway and peering into rooms for two or three minutes often feels uncomfortable to them. Some don’t know what to look for; others simply don’t want to face the challenges of moving poor teachers toward success — or out of their buildings.

This means that teachers are pretty much on their own, too. Yes, they have to undergo contractually specified evaluations. But as a recent report indicated, many districts show rates of “satisfactory” performance in excess of 99 percent. The teacher evaluation is one of many sham constructs in a deeply flawed collective-bargaining system.

While some teachers are indirectly accountable for student achievement, only those who teach reading and math may feel any real pressure to improve, and since this pressure is collective and weak, given how long schools are allowed to fail, after awhile it becomes relatively easy to ignore.

During my first years of consulting, I would often work in a school for a few days and have the strangest feeling that no one in particular was in charge of what went on there. In the years to come, I discovered that no one is really in charge of many of our schools because there is no long-established culture of personal accountability in education. And while many teachers undoubtedly feel personally accountable to their students, this sense of accountability often pertains more to the quality of their relationships than to students’ academic success.

Strong personal accountability is essential for the success of any organization, team or family. And it is precisely this type of accountability that lies at the root of most problems in education. In many places where I have worked, there really isn’t anyone minding the schools. Day after day, kids show up, teachers teach, principals and other administrators stay in their offices filling out paperwork. Rarely, if ever, do we see well-coordinated and closely monitored efforts at school- or district-wide change.

Not only is no one on the hook for results in our schools, most educators I speak to — from the classroom to the boardroom — feel undirected, unsupported and unappreciated by their higher-ups. This state of affairs must change if we are to see real progress.

All of this simply means moving away from the current collective accountability characterized most notably by No Child Left Behind and state testing and toward personal accountability at the building and district office levels. Curiously, no one seems to talk about the role school board members might play in this all-important change.

Board members may not have much experience in education, but they do have a lot of power — especially the power to ask who’s in charge. They have the power to change collective-bargaining agreements with teachers. They have the power to hire and fire superintendents. They also have the power to assess situations in their districts that no district employee may be empowered to investigate. Most important of all, most board members understand the value of personal accountability; many run successful businesses and families based on this very value. With time and effort, they may even be able to bring it to our schools.

Steve Peha is president of Teaching That Makes Sense Inc., a K-12 education consultancy based in Carrboro.

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