Mall Managers

SUNDAY, MAY 2, 2010

There's a lot of talk these days about the role of the principal in school improvement. I agree to some extent. Place a charismatic, caring principal with high expectations and boundless energy in the leadership role of a campus and things appear to get better. Even the "data" supports this conclusion. Heck, all the newly proposed federal programs to turn schools around (which is an interesting phrase given that 180 degrees from dysfunctional is still dysfunctional) begin with the assumption that to improve a failing school the principal must be replaced.

I'm no principal. But I sure have worked with a bunch of 'em. Here's the piece they don't get. Teaching is very scary. When I recall my first year of teaching, that first day when the bell rang and I shut the door and was alone in a room with 25 kids, I was petrified. I spent most of my first year being petrified. My second year was much better because I had files from the first year. I knew what I was doing, or at least, I knew what I had done. This was not new ground, this was becoming a beaten path. Ahh, I was safe because I could now speak from experience. Not research, data, or collaborative insight - but experience. And what was really cool was that I could now close the door with my second batch ( 3rd, 10th, 20th) and do what I damn well pleased as long as I did not steal paper clips, throw a kid up against the wall, slap a parent or cuss the principal, all of which I was tempted to do at some point.

I viewed the classroom as my domain. The room was "mine", the desk was "mine", the kids were "mine." I was like the sole proprietor of room 241. I was the boss. (It really did not enter my head that the school belonged to the community, the kids belonged to their parents, and the desk was purchased with tax dollars at the lowest bid. It was still "mine.")

In fact, I worked on a hallway where everyone thought the same way. We had all been scared, now we were safe, and we all owned our rooms. It was like the nearby shopping mall. Each store front marketed a different brand and each store was managed by some entrepreneur. Sure, the mall had managers who made sure that the bathrooms were cleaned, the mall was mopped, security was present, etc. But, the store operators were the real bosses.

Principals are like mall managers. They can call meetings and teachers will show up, but we hate to be there because the real work is in our classrooms. Hell, they can even ask us to engage in professional learning communities or other such sneaky attempts to get us to change or improve what we are doing. Each of us teachers will go, be polite -- well, some of us will knit, send text messages, grade papers, etc. - smile and nod, all the while secretly resenting that we had to leave our own stores, uh, classrooms. We'll say what we have to say, but we will return once more to our rooms, close the door, and do what we damn well please. To do anything else makes the day as scary as our first year.

Even if the kids don't learn, at least we aren't petrified.