KrazyTA, a regular commenter on the blog, offered his definition of leadership in dialogue with other readers. It got a great response.
Here goes:
“I once had a job where I was a clerk typist in an academic library. I had three supervisors: from the bottom up they were a librarian-in-training, a professional librarian, and the librarian who ran the entire department I worked in. **Not bragging: I was a good enough typist that I secured several jobs largely because of my typing skills.** Not just in my evaluations [I did very well indeed] but in my day-to-day work, I never resented any one of them evaluating me or offering me suggestions or guidance. It took me a while to figure out why I enjoyed working ‘under’ them, but it finally dawned on me: any one of them, if necessary, could have done my [overall] job as well or better than I could. That’s why they didn’t [and didn’t need to] bully or order me into doing anything: I knew they understand what I was doing, and how to get it done, and what limitations I worked under, and their orders never needed to be more than gentle suggestions because they really and truly knew what needed to be done and the practicalities of how to get from here to there. I wish I could say all my jobs were like that, but why spoil your day and mine?
😦
“In other words, moral leadership, modesty and personal example. The accountabullies know about carrots and sticks because you can add those up, divide ‘em into percentages, use ‘em in ever greater quantities to humiliate teaching staff—but moral leadership and modesty and personal example, now where would that fit into a VAManiac’s neat little faux formula?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Having a boss that you respect is key. If you don’t value the boss’s ability to do your job, then it is difficult to respect their comments. When they evaluate you and even the GOOD comments are misguided and inaccurate, you know that they are just going through the motions and writing whatever they wish as an evaluation. When they allow people who bully children to continue working without reprimand, there is a problem. When they never have positive comments but only give hateful criticisms based on things they do not really know, they are not worthy of respect. Add to that a system that bases a teacher’s worth on AYP and you have a perfect storm for a bad experience.
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Here’s a kind of mirror-image story. At 25 I got a fabulous but tough job; I needed superb typing skills as a copyreader/writer on a newswire in NYC. But as a teenager I had thought if I didn’t have great typing skills, I couldn’t become a secretary. Which I never wanted to do. So my skills were weak. And it wasn’t easy to learn the job. But they gave me a chance. Everyone there had worked the job. They knew it was tough. But they were fair and I was able to learn and do very well in it.
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Hi Diane! I love this term “accountabullies” that KrazyTA uses. I feel like the corporatized view of education thinks of these bullies as being “educators.” There’s a campaign that started yesterday actually that addresses how the bullies have made inroads at Teachers College, Columbia University that you might like to check out. We’re calling for the President of Teachers College, Susan Fuhrman, to divest from Pearson. I wonder if your readers would think of this as a revolt against the accountabullies?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fuhrman-Cut-Ties-With-Pearson/447149925365555
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Hi Diane! I love this term “accountabullies” that KrazyTA uses. I feel like the corporatized view of education thinks of these bullies as being “educators”–but it’s just that, large-scale political bullying. There’s a campaign that started yesterday actually that addresses how the bullies have made inroads at Teachers College, Columbia University that you might like to check out. We’re calling for the President of Teachers College, Susan Fuhrman, to divest from Pearson. I wonder if your readers would think of this as a revolt against the accountabullies?
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Fuhrman-Cut-Ties-With-Pearson/447149925365555
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Leadership is what success in any field is all about, military being the most important as people die immediately in battle without it. Schools are the same as they die without it. That is the problem at all medium to large school districts in general now. The largest have the worst leadership now. Is it any wonder they are having problems? No one running the largest school districts cares one bit about the students or taxpayers. They are out to do only a few things and none of them concern education. First is to pork you benefactors, puppet masters. Second is to destroy public education through privatization and corporatization of the education system. Third collect after passing go into your offshore account. End of message.
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KrazyTA, your post is a breath of fresh air.
Thank you.
–Krazy Math Lady
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KrazyMathLady: with your comment in hand, my day is starting off just fine.
“I can live for two months on a good compliment.” [Mark Twain]
🙂
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We let those bullies get a head start on us before we realized what was at stake. I spoke at the legislative Education Committee here in Louisiana yesterday in a room full of the very leaders CrazyTA is talking about. I admire their committment and tireless work to save public education from those “accountabullies”. I didn’t plan on speaking, but being surrounded by these leaders made me want to become one of them. I may be naive, but I think the tide may finally be turning here.
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Oops, I mean KrazyTA…
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It occurs to me that the current wave of supposedly “data-driven” educational leadership is very much reminiscent of Taylorism and the misuse and abuse of early IQ tests, both just about a century ago.
Taylor used to stand around factories, famously taking notes that he timed with his stopwatch (the only measurement tool he had, frankly) as he watched the workers. He would then write up a plan for management to speed up the workers and make more money and would charge enormous sums for it. He later admitted that he made it all up when he was writing his recommendations — but his philosophy made life unbelievably HELLish, to the great profits of the multi-millionaire corporate chieftains (the ones we are supposed to worship as philanthropists today: Mellon, Carnegie, and so on. (I use the word “Hellish” advisedly. Read anywhere about what working conditions were inside industrial enterprises 100 years ago — it was either a boiling, or freezing, or poisonous, or extremely dangerous inferno, and if you were one of the workers, any tiny existing benefits were constantly being taken away and workers were forced to speed up — with no medical or disability insurance for those injured or killed or sickened…
The early IQ tests were the first attempt by Galton and his followers to “prove” that White Anglo-Saxon or German Protestants were smarter than everyone else on the planet, and generally superior in every way. BTW, it took a lot of trial and error to find test items that would produce that result with any reliability: Binet and other early IQ test writers kept finding that on many questions or measurements, the kids that they “knew” were inferior, would get better results. That, of course, would not do, so those items were thrown out, systematically, until they found entire batteries of questions which would produce what they felt were the “correct” results. Those results included the suprising findings by Yerkes et al, when testing US Army draftees during 1917-1919, that recent immigrants of Jewish origin were ‘mentally inferior’ to native-born WASPs … All of which was used as fuel for the Eugenics movement and the racist anti-Chinese, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish — or should I just say, utterly racist — immigration quoa lawys passed bny COngrerss back then, just after another piece of mass insanity (Prohibition) was enacted, with similar perv erse results.
And, just as the current round of educational insanity is being funded by the uber-rich, all of those racist immigration quotas, forced sterilizations which gave Adolf Hitler and his party all the justification he needed to pass his racist Aryan laws and begin a racist, murderous world war. He could say, and did say, in truth (for once, because he generally lied all the time), that he was just using the ideas of the very best and whitest and richest and most powerful people in the US, who agreed with him on the need to keep down the swarthy types and labor organizers and leftists of any persuasion.
You can read about this in many places. I’ll give you a few cita5tions but the butter is burning on the stov e./
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Hello to Mr B, another education hero and blog I never miss!
Thank you for all you do had have been doing to support/save public education.
PS: “just after another piece of mass insanity (Prohibition)”
Love it.
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Ang: what you said!
🙂
For those who may not have visited his website, it is entitled “GFBRANDENBURG’S BLOG JUST A BLOG BY A GUY WHO’S A RETIRED MATH TEACHER” [http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com].
Thankfully he is not the only numbers/stats person with a website who counters the accountabullies’ attempts at “mathematical intimidation” by spinning, distorting and tailoring the numbers to suit the charterite/privatizer agenda of $tudent $ucce$$.
M. Schneider [see above] spoke in the comments section of an April 6, 2013 posting on this blog about the ethnical numbers/stats folks: “Some of us use our powers for good.”
I too applaud GF Brandenburg for using his powers for good.
🙂
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Hi KrazyTA,
Congrats on being “front page, above the fold”!
Your post on leadership got me to thinking…dangerous, I know.
Leadership in the context of the school house..the principal and administrators.
I have noticed a shift in recent years.
Gone is the principal who wants to be a principal. The person who wanted to be part of the community, attend the games, knew all the kids, walked the halls, knew every teachers strengths/weaknesses and peculiarities, he/she seems to be gone.
Replaced by someone who sits in the office, goes to meetings and sends out edicts, and seems very angry most of the time.
The now goal seems to not be a principal, but to move up to the county office or the state BOE.
They have to “make their mark” quickly, so the school house is left with petty tyrants coming and going through the revolving door.
Just the contents of my head.
Again, thought provoking post, as always, thanks.
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Whoa! You’re right, Ang. Now, everybody is interested in your five or ten year career goals. They want to know where you plan to be down the road. I just wanted to be in the classroom. I always found it slightly weird that they wanted me to have other plans. There was always plenty to learn right where I was.
KrazyTA, oh how I needed your typing prowess in my heyday! I couldn’t type worth beans (although the computer has now eliminated my typing anxiety). I used to find myself complimenting myself on my speed, at which point I would screw up royally and have to spend five minutes making corrections on multiple copies. That leads to an addition to your comments about bosses. I think that perhaps the most important characteristic of your bosses was that they recognized your talents and treated you with respect. They didn’t have to be able to do your job as well if not better than you. They recognized that you could do it and would do it well. I don’t ever remember having or working with a bad teaching assistant, and all of them brought skills and ideas that were an asset to the classroom.
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Some of us still care about our students, teachers, and community. It’s dangerous to make generalizions. Yes, we must follow state mandates and laws, but that doesn’t mean we are the bad guys. It just means that it is much more difficult now to be a principal. The good ole days of principalship are gone. That is why most of them are no longer around. The ones who have stuck it out have had to adapt. The others have been replaced by a new breed who don’t know anything other than the accountability madness. It’s hard to do things differently when there are no role models. I hope the next generation of principals will be able to take our students beyond this Ed Deform madness. I have hope that we will succeed.
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Great post, Krazy TA. I was so lucky to have worked with REAL principals–that is, people who had actually taught for more than three years. Most of them had not, however, taught special ed. students (either in self-contained classes or inclusive classrooms–the latter hadn’t yet existed). However, those principals highly regarded and respected–(yes, respect for teachers,I know,,,) us–and our students. I now am getting faklempt (for those unfamiliar, Yiddish word used often by Mike Meyers on SNL skit, “KAWfee Talk,” referring to teary-eyed & sentimental). Therefore, I am going to stop typing now. Talk amongst yourselves. I’ll give you a topic: when principals were real, when teachers were respected and when children had recess.
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“when principals were real, when teachers were respected and when children had recess.”
I could go on and on , too!
Get together for coffee?
😉
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