Management

The new DoE seems to be begging for new ways to run schools. It is possible that there are many sincere people involved in this. The DoE has created a school to teach people how to manage schools. I then hear from people who work for these new principals and they are often very disappointed with the level of management. I wonder why.

My masters program emphasized management. We read books about how the best organizations were managed. It was an interesting program. It did not emphasize managing schools. It emphasized managing people. Klein seems to have fallen in love with Jack Welch. Welch talks about getting rid of the bottom 10% of your workers to make things efficient. This would seem to be a sensible approach to management. The problem is that we are dealing with public employees. These employees are more about politics than management. If you look around the rubber room you will see that people here are not the bottom 10% they are the people who the principal has a political agenda against.

There are teachers in my school who are spectacularly bad. AP's are after some of them but most of them are not attacked. If they pass the kids the AP is happy. The AP's grumble but they are not motivated to go after these poor teachers. The system is not designed to do this. Everyone complains about how hard it is to do. But it is really a matter of the will of the higher ups. They need to stop complaining about the contract and learn how to work within it. This is the same as the DA's office complaining about the constitution. If they wanted to eliminate the bottom 10% it would mean that there would be 5000 people in the rubber room, not 600+.

The first year that I was an AP I went to a meeting at the superintendent's. There was a power point presentation. They were sketching out how we were going to increase the math scores. They had a 5 year plan. At that point only 20% of the kids were on or above grade in math. They said that the next year we would increase the number to 23%. This seemed like a good increase and doable. The year after we would go to 25%. This seemed like it would be much harder to do. I was starting to wonder how we were going to pull this off. Then we would go to 35% then 50% then 80%. I thought to myself, these guys are crazy. They did this with a straight face.

The point of the above story is that the way you manage in the DoE is to promise something modest for next year and then something amazing for 5 years later. This makes you look like you are going to achieve great things. The institutional memory of the DoE is so short that you never get caught. Meanwhile everyone sees you as a visionary.

I have added another blog to my list of links. It is called Education Notes Online. It seems to be written by someone who is active in anti-unity UFT politics. My kind of guy.