Administrative assistance today

Administrators are education’s stock comic characters. From “Up the Down Staircase” to “Ferris Bueller” and “Dead Poets Society,” these are the villains who count paper clips, persecute hero teachers, and waylay kids whose only crime is to be charmingly mischievous. Others haunt their own corridors so anonymously that passing students wonder, “Hey, who’s the guy in the suit?”

My high school had a principal, but I wasn’t sure what he did. Our vice principal seemed to be in charge, but his job appeared to consist of handing out detentions and emceeing assemblies. I had the impression that the school pretty much ran itself. Based on my experience as a teacher, I now know that wasn’t the case. However, based on my experience and what I’ve gathered over the years from teachers in other schools, I now suspect that most of my teachers probably wished it did.

My students and I have been fortunate when it comes to our principals, but some administrators really do resemble fiction’s buffoons and cutthroats. They dress their follies up in jargon and pass them off as progress while remaining utter strangers to the classroom world they pretend to lead. They are incompetence personified, the Peter Principle made perfect.

At the same time, many school administrators are decent people trying to do a decent job. As for their competence, they’ve followed the track experts prescribe to prepare them for their responsibilities.

That’s a lot of the problem. Today’s administrators rarely come from the ranks of classroom teachers. Many reach the principal’s office via special education or the guidance department, while others leap directly, with little or no classroom experience, from learning about leading schools in education school to actually leading them in person.

Many administrators who did rise from the classroom fled because they couldn’t cut it in the trenches. Those who were good teachers fight a constant battle to remember through the clamor of administrative chores what it was really like back at the front. Over the years those memories inevitably fade.

Schools and students suffer because too many school leaders are strangers to the classroom arena where education happens. A principal’s daily routine should include teaching a regular class every day, all year long. Their superiors — superintendents, curriculum coordinators, special ed directors, state education bureaucrats, and assorted experts — should be required to rotate in for a reality check every five years for a full term as classroom teachers. I’m not talking about once in a while, or an hour here and another hour sitting in the back of someone else’s classroom. I mean a regular teaching assignment with a classroom, a curriculum, and students you have to deal with day in and day out from September to June. That way administrators’ perspectives and education policy wouldn’t as often be floating on fantasy and wishful thinking. We’d also be better able to separate the real education leaders from the incompetents. The real leaders would be the ones who can actually do what they say I should be doing.

None of this means that teachers appreciate all the pressures and problems their administrators face. In fact, good principals often see part of their job as running interference so their teachers are spared the political and fiscal complications that consume a principal’s time. I explained this once to a principal I met at a meeting. He seemed crestfallen that I seemed to be saying that the mark of a good principal consisted of knowing how to keep out of the way of his teachers.

There’s much more to it than that. I’ve seen devoted principals provide insight and able assistance to teachers who need help and suggestions, including me. Of course, guiding and instructing teachers requires that you need to have been a good teacher yourself.

Teaching isn’t theoretical or formulaic. It’s far less a science than it is a craft.

To be fair, school administrators face vexing challenges. They routinely wrestle with local, state and national political pressures and whims. They’re painfully aware of the “blizzard” of mandates and the “enormous increase in responsibilities” that schools have inherited without “the resources necessary to fulfill them.” Regarding these legislated millstones, in one surveyed superintendent’s words, “Most lawmakers don’t have a clue.”

Unfortunately, too often that “clue” gets misplaced on many administrators’ desks. Somehow, what seems clueless when superintendents hear it becomes the essence of “best practice” when they issue it as an edict to their principals and teachers.

I’ve worked with and for three principals. Each has been an individual different from the others, each a unique personality. But they have shared certain admirable traits. All have taken their work seriously but maintained a sense of humor, including a sense of humor about themselves. None have stood apart from their teachers, except to protect their teachers from unfair attacks and so draw the brunt of such attacks onto themselves.

All have become principals after first experiencing life for years as a classroom teacher. All have known their students, worked with their students, and cared about their students. All have allowed the free exchange of ideas. All have had ideas. All have kept an open office door. All have spent their days outside the office. All have been both leaders and partners. All have been both human and humane.

If you know such a principal, thank her.

I will, too. Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor. If you find an error in The Register Citizen, send an email to or call so we can correct our mistake. We are committed to correcting all errors or making clarifications that come to our attention, and encourage readers, story sources and the community at-large to point them out to us. Send an email to factcheck@registercitizen.com and let us know if there is more to add or something to correct in one of our stories. Also see our fact check blog http://registercitizenfactcheck. blogspot.com for some of our clarifications, corrections and additions to stories. You can report errors anonymously, or provide an email and/or other contact information so that we can confirm receipt and/or action on the matter, and ask you to clarify if necessary. We can’t guarantee a mistake-free newspaper and website, but we can pledge to be transparent about how we deal with and correct mistakes. Letters to the Editor: Email editor@registercitizen.com or mail to Letters to the Editor, The Register Citizen, 59 Field St., Torrington, CT 06790; ATT: Letter to the Editor. Rules for getting published: Please include your address and a daytime phone number for verification purposes only. Please limit your letters to 300 words per Letter to the Editor and one letter every fifteen days. We reserve the right to edit for length, grammar, spelling and objectionable content. Talk with us online: Find us at Facebook.com/registercitizen and twitter.com/registercitizen. For the latest local coverage, including breaking news, slideshows, videos, polls and more, visit www.registercitizen.com. Check out our blogs at www. registercitizen.com/blogs/opinion.