I read a post recently talking about education leaders coming from teachers. That, in my experience, is a very difficult transition for really dedicated classroom teachers to make. They are too often consumed with doing what is needed to be a great classroom teacher. Even when professional education organizations recruit leaders for their own organizations on the state, or national levels, teachers from their ranks often cannot get enough release time from their individual schools to serve in the high-time-demanding positions required to move up the ladder of leadership in those organizations. Often times, administrators, or education consultants move into these organizational leadership positions.
I am not saying that Administrators are poor leaders, or bad people. I am pointing out that they have a unique perspective and often one not close to that of a classroom teacher. YES, there are exceptions, and every administrator reading this post probably sees himself, or herself as such an exception. The point here however is that, in many instances, the further away from a classroom that an Education leader gets, the less the leadership becomes about education and the more it is affected by other influences.
It is understandable how this change in perspective happens. Moving from the decisions about learning to the decisions about building management, staff management, budget management, public relations, labor relations, teacher observations, schedule maintenance, community relations, Board meetings, and political considerations as a focus to lead a school or district is a shift from learning considerations being the focus. Such is the stuff of administration, and understandably there is little time left for much else. It is no wonder that the average career lifespan in a district of an administrator is less than three years. Of course administrators leaving buildings and districts after such short periods of time complicates things even more in a negative way for a variety of reasons, but that requires another post.
Next, we need to consider the influence of technology on our leaders. Data is King. Administrative decisions can now be more easily made and numbers can be tallied in the blink of an eye. We can call it researched-based decision-making, because we have the ability to easily quantify things. We have the all-powerful numbers. The question facing our leaders would be what things to quantify. Do we have the right numbers answering the right questions? What should we be assessing and how do we do it? Does assessment always require testing?
Who gets to make up the questions becomes key. Our politicians are concerned with elections and they will be driven by whatever the popular sentiment is, whether or not it is based in fact, or if it has an impact on learning. Our business leaders will be driven by whatever is profit bearing, whether or not has any bearing on learning. Then we have the media leaders who are driven by both the leaders of politics, as well as the leaders of business, and of course popular sentiment will drive the entire bus with all on board.
There are many things that are wrong with our education system, which cries out for leadership and change. Of course the greatest negative influences on education, which are often overlooked, come from the outside. Issues like poverty, security, safety, nutrition, health, and family support are some of these issues. That is all further complicated by political interference, as well as a mythology built around learning, motivation, and real assessment of learning. How are these measured? How will any core curriculum or standardization change these factors of influence? Non-educators claiming enough knowledge about education constantly legislate, and mandate many things that prove to educators to be counter productive to learning. Why is this met with such little resistance from educators? A better question might be why have educators been quiet about their objections?
Why were educators removed from the national discussion on education? How did education leaders allow this to happen? Who stood up for education?
Ask educators today where they stand on standardized testing and compare that answer to the national agenda. I believe they will be diametrically opposing positions. Who are the education leaders that allowed this to get so far from where we should be going? I wish I could point to the leaders standing up for education. I wish we could point to specific people directing the reform movement beyond just Diane Ravitch, Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and Michael Bloomberg. Those are the voices that have a platform, but how many have an education portfolio of experience?
I know the standout leaders of connected educators who speak out on many issues. I know Keynote speakers and education authors at National and statewide Education Conferences who regularly express many of the same the same concerns. They all seem to be cheerleaders for the cause of education, but have not found a way to lead educators. Is it the lack of leaders or the lack of access to a medium to get the message out?
“Why is this post filled with so many unanswered questions?” is a question that a leader should answer. Who steps up for education? Where are our leaders? What medium do we use for the educator’s voice? Politicians, business people and media people always have access to media and the public audience. Educators after being demoralized in too many cases are limited and seem to be far less inclined to speak out about needed reforms in education. But then again, even if politicians, business people and media folks were to manage their own industries and get out of education, who will step up to fill the void? Who are the real educators who will lead the real reform for education?
My Island View 
Thank you for this thought-provoking post. It’s made me consider whether, as a teacher educator, I am preparing teachers to fit into a box by stressing the meeting of professional standards over their right and obligation to challenge and imagine.
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You frame the issue as one concerning personalities (or the lack of them), but isn’t it also a lack of a vision – a vision concerning not only education in particular but the public sector in general? A depressing consensus seems to have emerged that the public sector exists solely to service the private sector. Once upon a time the opposite was assumed to be the case, with the public sector seen as a sphere that can sustain an ethic and a set of values that are superior to those pursued in business (as currently understood and instituted). Hannah Arendt, for instance, in books like “The Human Condition” tried to recover that older tradition, and now that they have made a film about her, perhaps the time has come for those who believe in the public sector to speak out more forcefully drawing intellectual support from the likes of Hannah Arendt.
Thought provoking post. All administrators I know have come out of the teaching corps. I’ve taught leadership classes for teachers who want to be administrators since 1995 and here is what I have seen. Today, classes have more women than men and the most common discipline is special education. This is a far cry from the old days when leaders were all most all men and the most common discipline was physical education. As an administrator you do lose some sight of classroom teaching as you deal with discipline, schedules, and other school management issues. As for data, I think that most administrators have a dim view of standardized testing. The problem is that they don’t make the logical step from crappy tests to crappy (worthless) data. There is way to much time spent pouring over test results. If you don’ know why, start with “The Myths of Standardized Testing.” Here is a link to my summary. http://bit.ly/lJLUNR Thanks Tom for all you do.
In my opinion, the problem is not simply one of who the leaders are from within the teaching community.
Gates, Rhee, Broad, Duncan, etc. have television, radio, policy institutes, governmental support, and big $ for selling their positions.
Teachers have megaphones and stand on streetcorners, metaphorically speaking.
Which group will have more influence?
You raise an important subject, and I thought you’d like to know that Ed Trust is sponsoring a spring series of webinars on that exact topic with the support of The Wallace Foundation.
Today is the kickoff, and it’s not too late to join.
Building the Profession: Helping Principals Become the Lever of Change
today at 4 p.m. ET.
http://www.edtrust.org/node/3436
Sigh. As one of those dreaded consultant ‘leaders’ you refer to, I feel the need to say, politely and respectfully, that you seem to have a blind spot about the limits of YOUR perspective as a teacher. Of course you can be a leader; of course you know things that matter. But that’s not sufficient to be a leader.
Leading requires vision, perspective, and policies. Vision: I have laid out a vision of how to educate for understanding and back it by school policies and structures, based on what real teachers do. Have you? Then how can a policy-maker or admin take you seriously as a leader? Perspective: I have witnessed thousands of classes, consulted to hundreds of schools and districts, audited dozens of local curricula and assessments; have you? (Most good veteran admins. have too, which is why their views may differ from yours). And I can say, without apology or arrogance, that in many schools good teachers have little perspective on the inadequacies of their colleagues’ grading systems, the lack of validity and rigor of many of their colleagues’ tests, and surprising ignorance about just how bad some of their colleagues down the hall really are.
Have you done a lot of walk-thrus? I have and all decent admins have. The range of quality in the average school is extraordinary and unacceptable: it explains much of what’s wrong in education. Have you audited local grades for consistency across teacher and as compared against state and national standards? It’s grim, even in really good districts. Have you tried to develop state portfolio systems that are better than state tests? I have: I worked on Vermont’s, Kentucky’s and North Carolina’s – all gone now, due to costs and technical problems. Turns out we have the tests we have for some good reasons. Do I like it? No. Do I get it? Yes.
So, understand: it sounds incredibly naive to people outside of schools to rail against policy-makers, admins, standardized testing, and teacher evaluation schemes – as if ONLY the classroom teacher really ‘gets’ education. It makes leaders stop listening; it sounds naive.
I felt this sting often in my early years working for Ted Sizer. I thought I knew enough about teaching to speak on all of education. Oops. Burned repeatedly. Basic Purpose-Audience issue: You had better know what they know and be ready to influence them in a way that puts concrete proposals on the table. I thus learned the hard way to become immersed in the technical and policy background before trying to argue with policy-makers who, I thought, were dopes about education. Sure: many of them WERE dopes, but that doesn’t earn you a hearing! So, for example, I spent 15 years studying how tests work in order to effectively go toe to toe with them as well as to offer a viable alternative policy on portfolios and performance assessments.
But I was also humbled along the way: I now know, for example, what I didn’t know then (and that few teachers understand still) is that ‘face validity’ of test questions is irrelevant to their predictive worth. I also now know that many teachers inappropriately mimic the format of state tests but not their rigor and incorrectly believe that tests demand poor rather than exemplary pedagogy. And I also now know (from studying hundreds of released items) that the questions that kids get the most wrong require higher-order thinking (transfer of learning and multi-step inference), not factoid questions.
I also now know that the available alternatives to standardized tests are few, if technical rigor, unobtrusiveness, and cost are going to matter most. Do I want to see more authentic assessments? Of course I do! I have advocated for them since the late 80s and inserted myself into policy debates even when I felt unwanted. But it isn’t going to happen if the educators calling for it have so little understanding of psychometrics and insufficient sensitivity to the pressing need for better accountability, believe me.
Wishful thinking (or worse, whining) is NOT a winning strategy: too many educators still don’t get this. The only thing policy people will listen to is – a better policy, thought through, vetted, and defended. That’s what my first Principal always said, too: don’t come to me with problems; come to me with solutions. That’s the way to become a leader.
So many powerful and important questions. The only thoughts I have to begin with are the following. Teachers are not usually highly paid and often have extensive responsibility beyond the school house–that might be a factor that affects voice. Also the structure of a typical school system might actually hinder growth and change. How can we better structure schools to optimize a wonderful education for all. Recently I heard a number of educators speak about creating small school systems as one way to affect more positive change, and I also listened in on some conversations with researchers looking for better measures to assess true success and engagement. I’ll continue to think about the wonderful points your raise.
Mr. Wiggins, I follow your work. Your words are wonderfully challenging. We need to lift our level of debate when it comes to the work we do. I appreciate the work that both you and Tom do to inspire and inform–debate like this will move our work forward with transparency and truth.
I have the same unanswered questions as you do Tom. In my current role I find it a real struggle to get the leaders to listen – they either don’t get edtech (bad) or aren’t interested (worse) or are opposed, whatever that means (worst). So I’m now involved with helping to organize #edcampwest which wil focus on disruptive education and try to link K-12 and HigherEd for perhaps the first time in this format… http://edcamp.wikispaces.com/edcamp+West It’s totally unofficial and organized from the grassroots – perhaps that is the only way?! Just do it I guess!
Mr. Wiggins, I keep thinking about your response, and while I am in favor of the points of debate you bring up, I also wonder if you realize the leadership Tom Whitby has brought to the profession. He and his colleagues have fostered valuable conversation, growth and research amongst 1,000s of teachers to grow the profession. He’s encouraged educators from all types of schools, grade levels and disciplines with his efforts–he is a wonderful leader who has a keen understanding of the challenges educators face in schools today.
Similarly your work has influenced the work we do at our school in positive ways. Your post has so many points to think about, debate and affirm. Those who know must speak up and share their thoughts in respectful, inclusive ways, and work to better schools for all. The questions are important, communication is critical, debate necessary–our schools hold tremendous potential for children and society, and we can reach that potential from doing at best work with our best skills in the arena where we teach and affect schools.
I enjoyed your post. I have to confess that I’m an outsider to the world of education. My wife works as college professor, but I serve the world as a software engineer. As a Dad, I consider myself a stakeholder in our education system. I want to understand the organization(s) that will help my kids become good citizens of the world and thrive.
I believe that your post underscores a profound need for our community to pay attention to the struggles around our education system. Your post affirms that many of the causes of strife in our education system have a great deal to do with external factors. (i.e. stress in a child’s home life, poverty, etc.) I also enjoyed your perspective that different stakeholders(business leaders, principals, teachers, leaders in government) all look at education in different ways.
In a more interesting world, it would awesome if WE could establish the “dream” state of education. What does the ideal education system look like? What are the requirements of this system? How do we celebrate and reward great teachers? How do we encourage creative thinking, personhood, and citizenship? I don’t know what the dream state should be. I, however, believe that we(together) can find it.
If I were to answer your post, I would say that education leaders are all around us today. As an US community of concerned citizens, we can probably do a better job of seeing education in relationship to other issues. We all need to see the big picture and work together to realize an education system that thrives. Perhaps the dream state of education should be to create leaders and create citizens of strong character.
Thanks again for the thoughtful post. I enjoyed it.
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The sacred duty of learning and teaching is disappearing because actually everyone involved in it are limited to his assigned works without thinking of going beyond for real knowledge….
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