Chapter Six - The Broken Body of Our Education System - A Principled Principal is Hard to Find
Posted on | December 19, 2004 |
Ah, the principal. Everyone remembers their principal, right? He (or she) is the head of the educational body. He was the guy whose office was seen only by the most disciplinarily helpless classmates. He had a paddle hanging on the wall in the reception area as a reminder to what would happen if you got out of line, and in the case of one of my classmates, a special paddle with her name on it. Most kids were never on the receiving end of that paddle, but just the knowledge that it was there, ready to be used, kept most of us in line. He also stood in the hallway before and after school greeting every child he saw by name, asking how their day was, how their parents were doing or how their pet dog was doing after tangling with that porcupine last week. Somehow, with some seemingly supernatural sense, the principal knew everything that was going on, at any time, inside and outside of the school.
His words over the intercom were few and far between, but when they were spoken, you knew they were important. I remember that I was in fourth grade when the principal’s voice came over the intercom to announce that President Reagan had been shot. Not a sound was made by student while he spoke, telling us that this was a strong nation, and we would survive whatever came our way. Not a sound was made by a student as the thirty seconds of silence that he asked for passed. It wasn’t that specific news that held our attention, either. It was the man who spoke it. We listened so well, because this was a man we respected, and we knew that if it was important enough for him to speak to us over the intercom about, it was damn well important enough for us to give him our undivided attention as we listened.
The principal was many things. A manager, supervising the teachers in their day to day job of educating, a maintenance man, changing light bulbs and working on boilers, a counselor, always there to lend an ear to a child in need, and a teacher, filling in for teachers who couldn’t be there. He was a politician, balancing the needs of his school with the requirements of the school board, and an arbitrator, keeping the peace between angry parents and harried teachers. He was a man with an important job.
Apparently, things have changed. Schools have gotten larger, and principals have more children and larger staffs that they are responsible for. They are treated with much less respect than in the past, be it by the students or the teachers. They have become less of figure to be both admired and feared and more of a figured to be scorned and ridiculed. Is this because of a change in the atmosphere in our schools? Yes, it is. But our principals are not just an innocent victim of that change, they are one of its harbingers.
Take for example, in one local school, the principal dislikes confrontation so much that he will simply not accept or return phone calls or make appointments to see parents. When a parent tries to handle a problem through the office, because the principal won’t see them personally, the staff is downright rude, bordering on obnoxious. A parent I know had to have their child (who has special needs) removed from the school because the principal refused to answer her complaints about physical abuse by other children on the bus and in the schoolyard. It wasn’t until they demanded funding from the school district for private education that the principal finally returned her calls. There is no excuse for this. First of all, as a Principal it is your job to deal with parents, yes, even confrontational ones. Second of all, no public employee should ever treat any member of the public rudely. And, third, as the principal, it is your job to make sure that your staff does theirs. The principal should never tolerate improper behavior from his staff. If you cannot do these simple tasks, you should find another job.
Another example, in another local school, the principal has rewritten the class schedule, shortening each of the seven daily classes by one minute, so she can have a full seven minutes every morning to lecture the school over the intercom. When asked what she talks about, the children can’t tell you. They say she just repeats herself and says the same stuff over and over. In return for her efforts, she is fully ignored by hundreds of students and their teachers for seven minutes a day, each and every day. If she ever really did say anything important, it wouldn’t be noticed anyway, because nobody is paying attention anymore. A few weeks ago, she spent ten minutes of lunch period with the kids who forgot their lunch cards in the auditorium, lecturing that they were all being willfully disobedient, and that if they continued to forget their lunch cards they would be given in-school suspension and that the school resource officer would write them tickets! What?! You’re going to take kids out of the classroom and put them in suspension because they forgot their lunch tickets? You’re threatening children with misdemeanors because they forgot their lunch tickets? Come on, get a grip! It is apparent that the children in this school are way out of control if this is the kind of hardcore troublemakers you have to deal with every day. If you can’t handle it without calling a cop, maybe you should try a new line of work.
The principal is the figurehead of an entire school. A principal must be able to command respect in all facets of their job from all those around them. They have to have a threat better than, “I’ll have the school resource officer write you a ticket!†They have to have a better reason for that threat than a kid forgetting lunch tickets. If they can’t, then they are just a pencil pushing pushover whom the student body will disobey for sport. They will invite challenge from their teaching staff, and the parents, and will spend more and more of their days diffusing out of control situations rather than managing a school, creating a downward spiral that will end where it should have started – with another form of employment.
In the next issue, I’ll get personal with the Administration. Boring, yes, but it still has to be done.
Wisdom
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