Truth & Morals in the Training of School People

2022

Truth & Morals in the Training of School People

Gene V Glass

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right thing. – Peter F. Drucker

The training of school administrators is trapped in a tug of war. The Academy insists that its values are honored. The public wants well-trained managers.

Academic Drift

Academic drift exists. It existed in 1956 when David Reisman named it [Note 2]. It exists today. Low prestige colleges aspire to be like high prestige colleges. My friend Werner says, with tongue in cheek, that Truman State University is the Harvard of the Midwest. No one says Harvard is the Truman State of the East. Why would the bottom of the hierarchy not want to climb to the top? Teaching loads – the hard work of Academe – are lighter up there. Pay is better. And even the casual observer knows that Harvard shines brighter than Truman State.

The normal school became the teachers college, and the teachers college became the state college, and the state college seeks to become a research university. In most places, academic drift is benign. It might produce some interesting courses, better majors, faculty who enjoy their work more. In other places, drift may have less beneficial effects or worse. The training of school administrators – along with that of several minor disciplines – may be one of the latter.

A school principal or superintendent is expected to have academic credentials [Note 3]. Once a masters degree sufficed, now increasingly a doctorate. Today’s corps of school leaders occupy a space somewhere between the worlds of practice and the Academy. Their training is subject to tensions pulling in two directions.

The training of school administrators in universities strives to meet the standards of the Academy while meeting the needs of the public. The result does not look like what universities are expected to do. The college is drifting. The public is pulling. What was once an academic education has largely been replaced by practical training. Courses aim to show aspiring administrators how to read budgets, whom to obey, what political directives can be ignored, and how to manage – dare one say manipulate – a board or a teachers union. Students are taught in graduate courses what they would learn in a few months as a practicing administrator. The years in graduate school teach them patience and test their fortitude. If they succeed, they receive a fine letter of recommendation.

Any attempt to change the training of school administrators cannot ignore the 150-year history of higher education in America. The unique character of this institution – increasingly imitated now by other nations – is the result of a coincidence. The growth of America’s colleges and universities was spurred by the Land Grant Act of 1862. At roughly the same time, activities that historically were self-taught were taking shape as professions: law, medicine, even teaching. The professions saw obvious advantages in forming a relationship with the burgeoning colleges. But a price had to be paid. Training in the minor disciplines, the professions, had to honor the values and norms of the Academy. And so professional training was shaped to resemble education in the traditional disciplines. For years – and maybe today – The Chronicle of Higher Education listed ads for Education professors under the Social Sciences. The Academy views the education of children as a place to apply the discoveries of Psychology, Economics, and Sociology. Heaven help us.

Gradually, the training of educators earned its place in the university by imitating the conduct of the basic disciplines. Educator training became the subject of research and theory. Education professors drew boxes and circles and arrows and filled them with neologisms. But nothing approaching a disconfirmable theory has ever emerged [Note 4]. It is debatable whether all the research attention given to the training of educators has improved the process.

The point at which the broader Academy imposes its values and standards on the program that trains school administrators is that dark cloud above the heads of faculty and students: the dissertation. Terminal degrees in medicine, law, and a few other professions do not require dissertation research. However, rarely does a preparation program in the minor disciplines escape scrutiny of its dissertations by the university faculty beyond the program. Less powerful colleges must toe the line and produce what the larger university requires: research, a contribution to knowledge, the dissertation. Examination committees drawn from the university at large apply their norms where they are seldom helpful or appropriate. Dissertations need theories, and theories need hypotheses, and hypotheses are accepted or rejected by data. And of course, recommendations for future research keep the entire charade alive. All of this is dysfunctional in the education of school administrators. Professional colleges benefit from academic drift; they suffer as well.

The most important work being done about education today is not being done by scientists but by journalists, and by academics functioning as journalists. Their investigative techniques are those of lawyers, accountants, and historians. Their reports are narrations, not tables of numbers or complicated statistics. They have exposed the worst kinds of corruption in the charter school movement. Social media have placed the power of journalism in the hands of legions of angry educators. An opt-out movement generated and sustained on Twitter and Facebook challenges the economic interests of giant test publishers. The FOIA request replaces the contingency table. Examination of IRS returns shows what the Secretary of Education values. Blogs are born when magazines die. The Google search has replaced the library card catalogue.

The Pull of Practice

Academic drift is only one of the pressures exerted on the training of school administrators. The tug of practice is the other.

There is a general dissatisfaction with how the Academy is training those who manage the public schools. The public – in this case school boards, state agencies, even the federal government – thinks that the graduates are poorly trained. Newly minted principals mishandle budgets, violate hiring and dismissal laws, and are ignorant of special education regulations, or so it is claimed. The field believes it knows how things ought to be done.

This discontent applies not only to what is viewed as a lack of practical training but to the politically liberal disposition of the faculty doing the training. Some districts, foundations, and a couple of non-traditional organizations provide alternative training and certification. One such example is the development of the School Leadership Institute in Boston in 2003, where the district authority established its own leader certification. Similar efforts exist in Denver with the Ritchie Program for School Leaders, in New York with the NYC Leadership Academy and the APLUS program, the KIPP administrator training program, and San Diego’s Educational Leadership Academy.

Alternative certification of school administrators reaches its most transparent political expression in the Broad foundation’s Broad Academy: “…a two-year fellowship for highly motivated, accomplished professionals who are driving excellence and equity to make real, lasting impact for students and families.” (www.broadcenter.org/broad-academy/) Behind the platitudes is a short-term indoctrination in anti-union and Conservative politics for urban school administrators.

But what could possibly be wrong with tying university-based training more closely to the needs of practice? So what if the Academy gives in to the pull of practice? The program desired by the field, those employers of the program graduates, will teach compliance, obedience, and conformity. Administrators in-training won’t be encouraged to question the status quo, to critique it, then to resist the pressures that maintain it. The college is no longer a searcher for the truth, veritas, that “ fearless sifting and winnowing by which the truth shall be known.” Its success is measured by the happiness of its constituency, both the aspiring administrators it trains and those who hire them. If its graduates find well-paid jobs and more students arrive with $60,000 in hand, the program is a success [Note 5]. But this is not what the nation needs.

Teaching the Truth About Public Education

The education of school managers is trapped in a tug of war. On one side is the university seeking to impose its standards; on the other, the field demanding that its needs be met. Can it be rescued? Perhaps, perhaps not. What will be left if the education of leaders turns away from the pretense of scientific research on the one hand and the provision of practical experience on the other; from pleasing the Academy while pleasing the consumers of its products?

Public education has reached a precarious point in its history. What was once lauded as the “greatest discovery ever made by man” has been branded a failure [Note 6]. Profit-making corporations seek to enrich their owners with public tax money by creating chains of charter schools. Religious fundamentalists want to erase lines between church and state. Giant corporations lobby legislatures to pass laws that create markets for what they produce: tests, books to prepare for the tests, and machines that score the tests. Billionaires, whose trust in their own intelligence knows no bounds, spend tens, hundreds of millions to bend a half-trillion dollar public endeavor according to their lights. Media are paid millions to shill for a Common Core curriculum. The think tanks are bought. Parents attempt to protect their children and their school by opting out of standardized testing, and a legislature in the South threatens to withdraw the certification of any teacher who mentions “opt out” in class. Tech companies peddle electronics with promises of better achievement and lower costs through “personalized learning.” Teachers are rewarded or punished based on their students’ test scores. A system that fought a half-century campaign to teach white and black children equally now resegregates with the help of charter schools, tuition tax credits, and open enrollment. And one’s imagination staggers under the revelation that the country’s largest charter school chain was using its considerable profits to finance a coup in Turkey.

The super rich have targeted public education as a key element in their Utopian plans. The Walton family believes that teacher unions and schools not “chosen” by families are holding America back. A man named Koch from Wichita – whose father founded the John Birch Society and left his sons an immense fortune – yearns to teach children the evils of government regulation. Koch knows that a mere ten thousand dollars can buy a spot in a school board election; and then the board can get to work rewriting curriculum. The philanthro-capitalists invest millions in “think tanks” that release crypto-conservative politics disguised as research.

The truth about the nation’s public schools today is that enormously wealthy and powerful forces wish to destroy the last public institution that stands any chance of uniting a polarized and diverse nation. At the heart of the education of those who will be entrusted with the future of “the greatest discovery ever made by man” must be the understanding to counter those forces. Otherwise the greatness of a nation could be lost.

The school leader’s most important responsibility today is the protection of the staff and the children in their charge from the destructive intrusions of meddlesome bureaucrats, rapacious corporations, crackpot federal mandates, and pressure groups of true believers. These intrusions can only be fended off once they are understood.

The pressing moral choices that will engage today’s school leaders concern resegregation, privatization, and the infiltration of religious orthodoxy. Training of leaders that slights the moral dilemmas facing public education is training that fails to meet the needs of society at a time when moral leadership is needed as in no time before.

It is a sign of our failure as educators of today’s administrators that they are largely unaware that their greatest challenges as leaders will be to make the correct moral choices. To speak of school leaders as moral agents evokes faint images of the 19th century common school. Horace Mann was quoted as having said “… [ten] have failed from defect in morals where one has failed from defect in intellect.” [Note 7] And that “Scientific truth is marvelous, but moral truth is divine; and whoever breathes its air and walks by its light has found the lost paradise.” [Note 8] That Mann’s homilies strike ears today as quaint is a measure of the drift of contemporary professional life from its moral purposes.

Notes

1. Drucker, P.F. (2001). The essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker's Essential Writings on Management. NY: HarperCollins. P. 167
2. Less prestigious and less well resourced colleges strive to be like the more successful and higher status ones. Riesman, D. (1956) Constraint and variety in American education. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
3. Put aside for the moment the rise of alternative certification programs that deserve attention but are still too small to be of concern here.
4. Meehl, P. E. (1978). Theoretical risks and tabular asterisks: Sir Karl, Sir Ronald, and the slow progress of soft psychology. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(4), 806-834.
5. The modern MBA costs between $50,000 and $80,000, and considerably more at more prestigious universities.
6. Horace Mann. Mark Twain was even more specific: “… out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.” (https://bit.ly/2UjfgcI)
7. Hoitt, J. B. (1890). Excellent Quotations for Home and School. Republished by the University of Michigan Library in 2009. P. 73
8. Horace Mann (1850). “A Few Thoughts for a Young Man” A lecture, delivered before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, on its 29th anniversary.” P. 38.