Principals matter

Why does noone want to be a school principal?

The numbers of applicants for principal positions in Victoria is low – in an increasing number of cases appointments are not made at all. Potential candidates see a principal’s job as underpaid and too complex; the hours too long; and the work characterised by a lack of public respect and potential conflict.

The recent publicity surrounding primary principal Sue Knight and the Jim Henson photography affair brings into sharp relief the issues that discourage teachers from applying for promotion to principal positions. Interestingly, in this case, the principal concerned was saved from media crucifixion by her community. However, the story showed how 20 years of dedicated and exemplary service can be overshadowed by the media indulging in its usual game of whipping up fear amongst parents, and how the politically sensitive managers of education can be unwilling to publicly support such a person in the face of possible scandal.

In some ways principals themselves are to blame for the negative view that many teachers hold of the job.

Principals spend too much time talking about working 70 or 80 hours a week and saying how complex and demanding is their job. It is incredibly demanding and complex and exhausting. But classroom teaching can also be demanding and exhausting.

Principals need to talk about the things that are good about the job; about the ability to get your head above the water and think about education in a broader sense; about the ability to make a difference for their community; about the satisfaction that can come from seeing through a major project. These things get lost in the backscatter of the everyday worries that make up a principal’s usual day.

What is needed is a new model of the principalship. One where the principal is, first and foremost, the educational leader of the school community.

Many leading teachers and assistant principals are ready to become principals in their 30s. They have developed their teaching craft, they have the required people skills and are keen to have a go. They also have the greatest prerequisite of all – lots of energy. So why aren’t they applying for principal positions?

What scares off potential candidates?

What don’t they have that they need?

Her are some of the issues.

Potential candidates don’t have the background knowledge that they think they may need. They don’t have the history in their heads of why things are the way they are. They don’t know how or why the funding model works the way it does, and they don’t know all the acronyms and the jargon and the administrative details required to run a Victorian school.

They don’t know what they don’t know and this worries them.

Nobody ever describes the job of a principal in simple, easy to understand, and non-threatening terms. The professional standards and selection criteria describe an incredibly complex and impossible job without giving any real sense of what a principal does on a day-to-day basis. It would be no surprise if turning base metal into gold was on the list, so detailed and overblown are the selection criteria.

They worry about being able to deal with the hard stuff alone. Because principals are alone. When the going gets tough with parents or kids, principals have to deal with the issue, mostly using skills and techniques they have learned by working with others or that they have developed for themselves. Support from above, no matter how comprehensive, cannot help with the daily problems on the ground. These skills can be taught, however, and should be. More extensive mentoring and training is required in this context

The rewards are too modest and the workload intimidating. The salary is not big enough to change your life. And principals are time poor. Somehow the system needs to address these issues. Aspirants see the long hours, the vacation work and the evening commitments and, quite rightly, think it’s not worth it.

Teachers see the work of principals as one step removed from education. So much administration and policy compliance work has been devolved to schools that teachers see their principal as a HR and accounts manager rather than as an educational leader. And by the time candidates have got to Assistant Principal level they are already missing the contact with kids and teaching – the very things that brought them to the profession in the first place. Becoming a principal looks like getting even further away from the kids.

So what needs to be done?

Pay principals more – especially those in small schools where principals have only a small team to help with the work. Pay them enough so they can afford a gardener and a house cleaner occasionally. (Remember when principals in regional areas were given a house?)

Pay principals enough so that people in the community think being a school principal is an important job. Increase the status of the job.

Or give them some time – a sabbatical of 3 months every three to five years. Time when they can think about the job for more than four minutes and not on the weekends when they should be spending time with their family or getting some recreation

Pair experienced principals with new principals. The current mentoring system is good but it adds an extra task for already overworked principals. These people already have too much to do. Give a new principal a mentor for two days a week for two years. It’s not that expensive. Certainly a whole lot cheaper than replacing sick and besieged principals. It would have a dramatic effect on a person’s ability to grow in the first years of the job.

A good model would have more experienced principals sharing responsibility for a school with a new principal. A school would sometimes have two principals. And a principal may have more than one school. The mentor principal may have several schools with newly appointed principals.

Pair some young energetic people with more experienced principals who know the system and can give cool advice when circumstances require.

Take back some of the low skill administrative work that principals do – or provide some real administrative support. There are too many low skilled compliance tasks. In a large school, the employment and HR work and responsibility is made worse by a cumbersome and inflexible employment system. Recent changes, although welcome, have not decreased the workload significantly.

Change the public perception of the job.

Teachers and principals are their own worst enemies in this respect. When one moves from teacher to principal, community expectation of the workload changes. The community, although sympathetic, expects a principal to work impossibly long hours and to be on call at all times. Principals need to be seen as educational experts. The current emphasis on transparency and data does not help. Neither does the public discussion of the removal of underperforming principals. Schools underperform for many reasons – very rarely is the principal the main factor.

The central administration needs to support principals publicly in a crisis and promote the knowledge experience and commitment of principals. In many cases principals feel they are sheeted the blame for shortcomings of the system.

Recent thinking in education emphasises the importance of instructional leadership in schools. In an increasingly complex environment of rapid change, it is more important than ever that energetic, passionate and effective teachers aspire to the principalship. It is incumbent upon the system to ensure that those teachers want to become principals.

Its education week.

So many things happening that I begin to wonder if they all get in the way of education. Guest speakers, big events, glossy brochures, visiting dignitaries…..you know the routine.

But today I was part of an education week activity that made remember why I have spent my whole adult life doing this stuff.
One of our teachers decided that he wanted to put together the biggest band he could using the students and staff from the school. He put together a simple guitar riff and began rehearsing people and spruiking his event. By his own admission he was heartily sick of it by the time today came around.
But.
But today I took my place with a whole bunch of kids and teachers from our school and Rob made it all happen.

It was only ten minutes. But for that ten minutes everyone on that stage felt a part of something and was smiling like a lunatic. For that ten minutes we all made the same big sound together. For that ten minutes we were a little community.

Maybe we didn’t learn much about music, but we certainly learned a big something. A big something that cant be assessed or written about in reports. But a big something nevertheless.

Why are so many of my principal class colleagues sick? Why do so many of them suffer from depression or anxiety?

There are a number of possibilities here:

• There is a general epidemic of depression and anxiety. School principals are no different to any other group.
• The job is too demanding – workload too high
• The selection process is such that the wrong people get these jobs
• There is not enough support from above – workload too demanding
• They are a bunch of moaning whingers who don’t understand what it is to work hard.
• They are making themselves feel responsible for things that are not their responsibility.
• All of the above

The centre pumps out a stream of literature about school improvement, effective leadership, theories of educational reform etc. In fact we have been hearing the same stuff for almost a decade now.

Have things changed?

Not much

Once secondary principals were responsible for the general tone and conduct of their school. The ‘Department’ was responsible for the quality of staff, the state of the buildings and just about everything else.

Now an individual principal is perceived as being responsible for system failures that are beyond his or her control. If a school’s buildings are dilapidated it is the principal’s fault because he/she has not been politically astute enough, or good enough at chasing grants or has been unable to raise the profile and thus the enrollment level of the school.

The truth is somewhat different. Schools with declining enrollments (for whatever reason) go int a downward spiral of decreasing funds, reductions in program, inability to recruit new staff, decline in local reputation. Things just get harder. The principal is seen as responsible for this decline. Fiddling while Rome burns.

Admittedly, responsibility may lay with the principal. There may have been an inability to tackle the big confidence issues. Or all this may be happening because of factors outside of their control.

Principals are constantly being told about research that shows that leadership is the most influential factor in determining the level of educational outcome in the system. This reinforces the notion of personal responsibility. Current thinking revolves around the work of Sergiovanni who argues that leadership has several different dimensions and that effective leaders must be skilled in all.

I believe this underlying assignment of responsibility for failures of the system is one of the major stressors for principals. They are expected to make the most of all bad situations.

This has been lately exacerbated by the government suggestion that ‘high-performing’ principals will be offered lucrative bonuses to work in designated underperforming schools. Further wevidence of the central belief that a principal should be able to turn a school around regardless of the socio- economic background of its students, the state of its facilities or the level of competition for enrollments in its area. Clearly this is a nonsense and a remnant of the economic rationalist model of the eighties and nineties.

It’s about blame sometimes. If your school is struggling it must be your fault.

Every time I talk to him he feels free to:

• Imply that I have no moral principles whatsosoever
•  Openly criticise my parenting
• Assert that I’m leading my school and society in general into moral and ethical turpitude

Our most recent battle has been over a novel studied in the middle years. He has combed the book for every swear word and sexual reference, listed them in an almost illiterate letter to the school council and then turned up at the meeting to demand it be removed from the curriculum.

I suppose everybody has right to their opinion, but why not take your kid somewhere else?

What do you say to the distraught and upset teacher in your office who says they are going to resign?
Here is what she said:

• I work hard and meet my commitments when there are a bunch of others in the school who do not. Often I have to pick up their slack. They come late to their classes, to yard duty. They are late meeting their deadlines. I have to teach my students stuff they should have taught them. They get paid the same amount I do.
• I don’t get paid enough and I will never get paid enough. I can’t make ends meet. I just make my mortgage each month.
• My employer, the government, does not care about teachers and is running us down in the press. It is offering us an insulting pay deal that does not even match inflation.
• The community does not value our work.
• I think I can get plenty of other jobs that pay a lot more.
• I work too many hours and I think about it the rest of the time.

Here’s what I said

• Give yourself a week. If you still feel this way, I will have to give your senior classes to someone else.

Its time teachers were paid a fair wage.
Otherwise the only ones left will be the wrong ones. The old, the lazy, the tired.

The end of another long break.

Actually a good one without too many unexpected crises – not yet anyway.

Spent some time reading and thinking about our organisation. I particularly liked Ricardo Semler’s Maverick, with its focus on democracy and participation in the work place. How it translates to schools I am not sure. But a good read.

So what focus for the new year?

Kevin Rudd’s digital education revolution?
How not to waste money on equipment that will quickly become obsolete?
How to get the best out of those really smart kids in Year 12?
Survive witout the workload and the loonie paents killing me?
Getting the next stage up for funding?

All of the above.

What would be a sensible way of dealing with the employment & HR tasks that a school needs to deal with? I know. Let’s interview everybody even if we know who we are going to employ. Let’s waste a bunch of time and money advertising jobs, reading applications, organising interviews, and actually doing interviews to no actual end. Let’s force people to chase jobs, front for interviews and sometimes drive for long distances when there is not really a job for them to get.
It could be argued that all this is really necessary to maintain a fair and equitable system, to prevent nepotism and to protect people from incompetent or vindictive principals. Probably all true.
But all this time must come from somewhere. Principals and assistant principals of large schools spend inordinate amounts of time doing all this stuff. Time that could and should be spent thinking about education, dealing with students, developing programs, getting productive things done. Teachers are time poor.
I am not suggesting that staffing become centralised again. Being able to choose your own staff has made a big difference to schools. The clock can’t be wound back.
Perhaps some of these tasks could be done by consultants. Teachers who work part time, retired principals and leading teachers who have done a lot of this work could put some time back into the schools.
Time wasting should be the enemy in school organisation. We need to refocus the energies of the most experienced practitioners in our school back to learning and away from useless repetitive and unproductive tasks.

I don’t know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of things to think about. When it comes to thinking, life is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park you should want to go on all the rides.

M.J. Hyland – ‘Carry Me Down.’ The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne 2006

Watch this video.
In it Sir Ken Robinson argues that our education system kills creativity in our children.
Education treats the body as a transport system for the head. Entertaining as well.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/66

The last two week of Semester 1 are devoted to the reporting process. A new set of standards, new software packages, stressed and tired teachers, computer problems, cold and dark.
At my school we will print around 13,000 individual reports – twice. The first run will be proof read by two people and returned for rewrites. The second run will be collated, covered, copied, distributed and filed before everyone falls into the winter vacation giving themselves permission to get sick.
I wonder about the educational benefit of all this work. Nobody thinks about the actual cost in man hours of this endeavour, but it must be huge.

Because the reporting process has become so demanding for teachers, reports have converged towards generic descriptions of the work completed and skills attained. In many cases the names and pronouns could be substituted and describe hundreds of different students. My own son’s high school reports tell me nothing about him and his relationship to the work he spends all day doing.

Measurement against the relevant standards also tells parents little. Think for a moment how this scheme was developed. At some point a team of people sat around and wrote down the skills and knowledge they thouhgt should be attained at a certain age. I imagine they did this by looking at what students can do at that age – how else?
In other words, the ‘expected level’ of achievement is the average level of achievement. The top part of the bell curve. Then all students are measured against this standard. Parents are happy if their children are at the expected level, but really they are being told that they are within the average range.
Congratulations, your child has measured up to a standard devised by looking at other students the same age. He or she has attained the average.

I sometimes think that this is what is wrong with our education system. Everything is measured against the mediocre. Mediocrity or worse is the inevitable result.

When I started teaching (in the distant reach of my memory now) my semester reports could be written in a morning. I did not have to spend weeks carefully organising my schedule so that I could ‘do‘ my reports. I had more time to think about the education of children or to spend relaxing with my family and friends. Both activities essential for renewal.

We work in a data driven environment. If it can’t be measured it’s not worth doing. Opening up the heads of our children to the wonder of the world around them must take a back seat to measurable ‘outcomes.’ The ‘deep learning’ espoused by the new standards are directly contradicted by the measurement and categorisination of skills and knowledge.
Somewhere along the way the professionalism of teachers was lost. The system no longer trusts them to know what to teach and how to teach it. The sytem no longer provides them with the time or the energy to allow them to disuss curriculum, to talk about kids, to think. They can’t be trusted to do a good job, so they must be held to ‘accountability’ measures.

Here’s my answer.
Pay teachers more.
Give them more time.
Reinvent the box ticking culture of accountability and take advantage of the vitality and excitement that walks in the gates of our schools every morning.

If we want a nation of boxticking cyborgs taught by tired, jaded and demoralised teachers, continue exapnding the agenda of national testing and standardised acoountability measures.
All they measure is what we already know.
A recipe for national mediocrity.