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A Pennsylvania law passed in 2012 drops the requirement that prospective school superintendents have any experience in a classroom. There is no longer a requirement for a superintendent to be a teacher or principal or to have an education-related degree.
And this is a BRAND NEW school too, first year in operation. And this school has been in the news lately over a scandalous affair that the administration tried to throw teachers under the bus for. And they got called on it in a town hall meaning. One parent want to FIGHT the vice principal right then and there.
I’m assuming this was a charter school. I had the misfortune of teaching at a charter school my first year teaching. Eight of the eleven teachers quit that year.
Yeah, because non-educators know so much about teaching and learning.
Quote:
Originally Posted by chiociolliscalves
More than any other post you've made in this thread, this one illustrates your ignorance. Leaders in business teach and learn as much as we do. My father, for example, even mentored young professionals in his field on a volunteer basis after he retired, after a career of teaching and learning within his leadership roles with a private non-profit and then in the public sector, leading staffs of hundreds of people.
You are someone who spent a professional career in education and apparently learned little about what leaders in other professions do.
Not sure if you're meaning to draw a correlation between what leaders in business do and what a classroom teacher of children does. If you are, based on my experience I think there's very little correlation between the two. I've seen, as have thousands of others,
a) people go from leadership in private and public sectors to teaching in a K-12 public school, and have also seen b) people teaching in public schools leave there and go into a career in the private or public sectors and in some instances eventually rise to leadership/management positions. I know about a dozen of these people fairly well and the fact is each one of them has remarked on the differences between the two environments far more than they have remarked on any commonalities. The people I know in group b) adapt in their second professions partly because of the skills they acquired in teaching. The people I know in group a) struggle to adapt to teaching partly because they find they have to modify or abandon more than a few of the skills they acquired in business. Yes, "Leaders in business teach and learn as much as we do." But it isn't the same kind of teaching and it isn't the same kind of information that's being learned.
As someone who has taught adults and taught children, trust me, being able to teach or train adults does not always correlate into being able to teach children. As long as you have expertise in the content area teaching adults is so much easier and takes such less effort on the part of the instructor that it isn’t even comparable.
Adults are voluntarily there - in some manner or another they decided to do this.
You are not responsible for the adult student’s physical safety.
You are not responsible if one student does something to another student. If an adult slugs another adult no one screams “why didn’t the teacher (stop/know/prevent) this!”
You don’t have to explain your actions to a 3rd party (parents).
You can kick an adult that disrupts the learning of other students out of the class.
Adults have an end goal in mind - whether getting a job, keeping a job, or preparing for better opportunities.
The assumption is that if the adult fails it is their fault.
Generally, the adults in the class or being trained will be of equal cognitive levels - they are self “tracked”. And if they aren’t, you are allowed to tell them they aren’t up to the work and need to choose another path.
No IEP’s.
If a student doesn’t have basic materials required for the class, such as pencils or paper, the teacher isn’t expected to provide it from their own funds.
The length of any contract will encompass months, not an entire year.
You can leave the room if you need to, without having to find another person to stand in the room.
I could go on and on with this, but the two are just not the same. Just ask the folks that have gone the Troops to Teachers route. The assumption was that they had a lot of experience with training barely out of adolescence young adults so it would be a practically seamless transition to teaching high school or middle school kids. That has not turned out to be reality. Don’t get me wrong, I actually think it’s a great program, especially for getting minority males in as teachers, but the success rate is nowhere near as high as graduates of traditional teacher prep programs. The bottom line is unless a person has actually tried to teach in a K-12 classroom they are unlikely to understand some of the unique factors of the job. Truthfully, I think administrators should have to return to the classroom once every 7-8 years for at least 2-3 months, because too many forget what it’s like. A lot of good administrators make it a point to find a way to cover classes occasionally each year to help keep an appropriate perspective.
So, no, I don’t want someone being a principal who has never taught that age level themselves. Don’t want a police chief who has never been a cop, a fire chief who has never been a fireman, a general who has never served in the military either.
Curious post. You have a litany of things, few of which are even duties/responsibilities of school administrators. Having to be in the room with students at all times? No IEPs? Really?
You also are ignorant of what supervisors/bosses outside of education have to do or are responsible for in those roles. Yes, bosses are responsible for the physical safety of their employees? You really don't know that? Are you acquainted with OSHA regulations? No, employees are not generally of similar cognitive levels. This is one of the many struggles bosses face. No, it is not easy in the age of human resources, to just kick an employee to the curb. Yes, as the boss, you are responsible if your employees are attacking each other, particularly if this has happened before or if there was something on their record that might have been a clue. Yes, bosses have to explain the performance of their charges to someone or some people all the time. No, many employees do not have an end goal in mind. No, many/most employees do not want to be there.
Is this really how you imagine the working world outside education to be?
Beyond all this, you haven't pointed out anything that an intelligent, experienced manager could not learn in a relatively short amount of time. What is much harder to teach, particularly to someone without the experience and without the aptitude, is how to lead and motivate hundreds of people. Again, that is the crucial variable, not whether they can deal with an environemnt where their teachers have to be in the room with students at all times or where there are IEP meetings.
Not sure if you're meaning to draw a correlation between what leaders in business do and what a classroom teacher of children does. If you are, based on my experience I think there's very little correlation between the two. I've seen, as have thousands of others,
a) people go from leadership in private and public sectors to teaching in a K-12 public school, and have also seen b) people teaching in public schools leave there and go into a career in the private or public sectors and in some instances eventually rise to leadership/management positions. I know about a dozen of these people fairly well and the fact is each one of them has remarked on the differences between the two environments far more than they have remarked on any commonalities. The people I know in group b) adapt in their second professions partly because of the skills they acquired in teaching. The people I know in group a) struggle to adapt to teaching partly because they find they have to modify or abandon more than a few of the skills they acquired in business. Yes, "Leaders in business teach and learn as much as we do." But it isn't the same kind of teaching and it isn't the same kind of information that's being learned.
Again, your anecdotal evidence is particularly helpful. The argument seems to be that unlike most every other sector, experienced, skilled manager just couldn't possibly come in and be adept at managing a school.
This sort of argument could not only be made in terms of leading a car company vs. leading an electronics company, but leading a high school vs. an elementary school. Of course, both sorts of things happen all the time. The key is whether the manager has the experience and acumen to lead and motivate people. If you think what we do has such specialized knowledge that intelligent people cannot grasp it and know how to use it, we're even more grossly undercompensated than any of us have ever imagined. I hate to burst anyone's bubble, but it really ain't rocket science and being an administrator isn't being a teacher, any way, and I would point out that the model of promoting teachers to administrators is failing badly and will continue to fail badly because these are two entirely different "skill sets" involved in each.
A Pennsylvania law passed in 2012 drops the requirement that prospective school superintendents have any experience in a classroom. There is no longer a requirement for a superintendent to be a teacher or principal or to have an education-related degree.
First, why don't you quit telling posters that you disagree with that they're ignorant.
I base my comments in this regard on the "experts" who had no background in education that we hired to teach. As I indicated earlier, it was about a 50% success rate. Most of them were overwhelmed by teenagers who didn't participate in the way adults participate in the work setting. And, btw, I include military people with this group. Additionally, they tended to want to get into content at an adult level that they would have encountered in the work setting, where many of the employees were college graduates...and 12 and 13 year-olds aren't ready for that level of content.
Your father mentored young professionals. They weren't pre-teens and teens, were they?
"Ignorant" is precisely the term to be used when someone speaks authoritatively over a subject about which she clearly knows little. I'm sorry if that hurts your feelings, but that's a choice you make yourself.
Again, I'm not particularly interested in a statistic you pulled out of thin air or somewhere else based upon your microscopic sample size. I also have been trying, apparently in vain, to focus on administrators, not teachers.
Experience teaching teens and pre-teens isn't a crucial variable in choosing who will lead and motivate a staff of a couple hundred teachers and other adults in a school. We have voluminous data demonstrating that hiring people with that experience does not translate into success in creating a good public education system. The model of promoting teachers to become these administrators is failing miserably.
Concerned citizens/taxpayers of the country, unite! You've nothing to lose but your committees!
Yes, I did share that memory about a committee, but you've forgotten the details. So let me refresh your memory. A group of teachers asked if they could form a committee about gum chewing and a few similar areas. I didn't make the committee...they did. I didn't tell them what to do...they went their own way. And it wasn't days...it was weeks. And you know what they -- the teachers -- learned...that they couldn't muster a consensus with what they wanted...that the faculty, in general, didn't agree with their position on almost anything. Sometimes teachers have to learn things the hard way, too.
I get it. You don't like administrators. That's fine. I don't like know it alls.
But let me tell you how it works, since apparently you don't quite get it.
If you're a teacher, you have bosses...the school administrators. I know...you don't like bosses. You wanna do what you wanna do.
If you're a school administrator, you have bosses...the district administrators and the state ed department and, in some instances the feds. We don't like bosses either. We wanna do what we wanna do.
If you're a district administrator, you have bosses...the superintendent, and the board of education, and the state board of education, and in some instances the feds. They don't like bosses either. They wanna do what they wanna do.
If you're the superintendent, you have bosses...the board of education, the state board of education, and in some cases the feds. They don't like bosses either. They wanna do what they wanna do.
If you're the board of education, you have bosses...the state board of education, in some cases the feds, and the voters. They don't like bosses either. They wanna do what they wanna do.
If you're the state board of education, you have bosses...newly elected officials (the governor, the state legislature), and sometimes the feds. They don't bosses either. They wanna do what they wanna do.
And you can go all the way up, and everyone has bosses. And you can go all the way down to Wal-Mart, or Kroger, or United Airlines, or the Trump hotels, or Holiday Inns, or even your church. Everyone has bosses. Even the independent business owner has bosses...they're called customers.
If you don't the way your school operates. Find another school.
If you don't like the way education works. Find another profession.
But quit whining about having a boss. It's the way life is.
More strawman arguments than I could shake a stick at.
You might remember, dear, that I was the one way back at the beginning of this thread who defended hierarchies, criticized your apparent propensity to try and make the workplace into a democracy of committees and told you: "A pity. You were a dictator all the time and you didn't know it."
Bosses are always dictators. The question is whether she is a benevolent dictator or a malevolent one. I include incompetence as a form of malevolence, too.
Far from "whining about having a boss," I've consistently asked for better ones, via breaking the mold of promoting teachers to administrators. Do you usually struggle with reading comprehension so badly as this, or are you just so annoyed and offended that you've stopped being rational? Is that my fault, too?
"If you don't like the way education works. Find another profession."
Funny. We just had a principal replaced who took that same moronic attitude about her staff. It turns out good teachers tend to leave that sort of environment. Like you and the other principal here, she also thought it was all just about the students and loving them and so on. She learned the hard way, with a forced retirement.
Curious post. You have a litany of things, few of which are even duties/responsibilities of school administrators. Having to be in the room with students at all times? No IEPs? Really?
You also are ignorant of what supervisors/bosses outside of education have to do or are responsible for in those roles. Yes, bosses are responsible for the physical safety of their employees? You really don't know that? Are you acquainted with OSHA regulations? No, employees are not generally of similar cognitive levels. This is one of the many struggles bosses face. No, it is not easy in the age of human resources, to just kick an employee to the curb. Yes, as the boss, you are responsible if your employees are attacking each other, particularly if this has happened before or if there was something on their record that might have been a clue. Yes, bosses have to explain the performance of their charges to someone or some people all the time. No, many employees do not have an end goal in mind. No, many/most employees do not want to be there.
Is this really how you imagine the working world outside education to be?
Beyond all this, you haven't pointed out anything that an intelligent, experienced manager could not learn in a relatively short amount of time. What is much harder to teach, particularly to someone without the experience and without the aptitude, is how to lead and motivate hundreds of people. Again, that is the crucial variable, not whether they can deal with an environemnt where their teachers have to be in the room with students at all times or where there are IEP meetings.
It’s very simple. I don’t want a leader who has no clue as to whether or not what they are asking of me is a realistic expectation. You can’t be a good leader if those designated to be led refuse to follow you or have no respect for you. The single worst principal I ever encountered was a former military officer, he could not get it through his head that the teachers weren’t like NCOs, nor were their students little privates. Kids won’t always do what is asked of them, even if it means they get in trouble. And the concept that children may fail a test because their parents got in a fight the night before seems to elude those who have never been in a classroom. Most people tend to resist being motivated by those they consider ignorant.
My post was a response to your assertion that people in business know what it’s like to teach because they train people. My point remains the same, there are different needs and therefore different skill sets required to teach children compared to adults. I don’t count training or educating adults as equal to classroom K-12 teaching experience. And you shouldn't take my teaching anatomy as equivalent to preforming physicals.
And, psst, classroom teachers are leaders - they are the leaders of children. How is this all related to the OP, which was about the behavior of children?
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