Top Down

Education is not alone in dealing with the phenomena of top down vs. bottom up managers. I think that this is endemic in American Business. I do think that it may be more prevalent in government jobs. The reason is that people are often rewarded more for not screwing up than they are for doing something positive. The key to succeeding in government or education is to gather job titles and move on as quickly as possible. The way you do this is to come in push people around and then get out before your staff morale drops to zero.

In order to make it in education most of us start as teachers. Many teachers like to control their class by intimidation. When these people move up they continue to feel that they can control their environment through intimidation. And they are often right in this assumption. My observation of teachers is that many of them make a lot of noise and then are unwilling to stand up and be counted. Tenure was invented to keep teachers from being subjected to the political whims of administrators and politicians. It should have made teachers feel free to express their opinions. It has not done this.

In my tenure at my old school there was two top down administrators. The first one was very bright and had a clear vision of what he wanted to accomplish. He stayed too long. He accomplished a lot the first few years, but he never created the school wide buy in that a more bottom up manager would have. The second administrator seemed to only care about power. She had no vision of what things should be and she lacked the intellect to actually accomplish anything. She constantly used the word insubordinate to express her dislike of anyone disagreeing with her. The union loved her when she started because they felt they could manipulate her in ways that they could not with the previous principal.

Like many not bright people the principal reacted negatively to any conversation started by the union or most of her AP's She did not react negatively because she disagreed with others. She reacted negatively because she often did not understand what people were saying to her and so she assumed that they were hustling her. The union thought they could manipulate her, instead they discovered an administrator that made random decisions, lurching from one direction to another. This is a hard person to work with. This is why the relationship between the union and the principal is so poor.

The comments about the APO and the Principal being at war are certainly true. In most schools the relationship is strained but not nearly as negative as the one in my old school. I think things started to fall apart when the two of them chose to live in a world of wishful thinking instead of just dealing with the good and the bad. As an example, every APO I have met looked at the average number of sick days their staff had each year and set aside money to cover this. If they could lower the number, great, if not they were covered. The power structure at my old school decided they would lower the number by intimidation and threats. Of course it did not work, and so they blamed each other for the failure of an absurd policy and the resulting budget cris. Neither one of them is capable of looking at the policy and altering it to fit reality. Both of them in their own way want reality to alter to fit them.

I was at my old school to listen to a guy named Will Richardson talk. He writes a blog at http://weblogg-ed.com/. Take a look at the March 13th entry in which he talks about what being in the school was like.