When There's No Support From The Front Office

The main function of a manager is to create and maintain the conditions that make it easiest for the worker bees to do their very best work. 

That is also true--especially true--of school district administrators. At the heart of so many education issues, you will find administrators.

Take the ongoing flaps over Naughty Books and Controversial Topics. In many communities around the country, complaints large and small are being lodged against teachers and librarians. In some states, laws have been passed. School administrators can send their staffs one of a couple of messages:

1) As long as you are using your best professional judgment, I will have your back. Just get in there and do the work and let me worry about cranky parents.

2) It'd be great if you just don't do or say or read anything remotely controversial, because at the first phone call I am going to fold like a wet paper back full of bricks. 

Don't Say Gay laws are about creating a chilling effect, and that chill starts in the front office. The chilling has been so effective that even in states that have no actual DSG or Anti-Controversy laws, you'll find plenty of administrators who are trying to keep their cold tootsies safe from any angry phone calls. All of this trickles down to the classroom; if you've got to watch your own back and teach at the same time, you'll be more timid, more cautious, less engaging and creative-- or you'll be that teacher who's considered a Problem, because you are constantly fighting to be allowed to do your job.

Or take the ongoing struggles with post-pandemess student behavior. This is not a new issue-- students have presented behavior challenges since before the invention of dirt-- but numerous reports tell us that since 2020, behavior issues have increased.

Support from the front office is critical. Without it, a teacher's hands are tied. It's a frustrating scenario-- you may have one student who consistently acts out, even after you've tried all the available interventions, and who makes it that much harder for the other twenty-some students in the room to get an education. But the office provides no support, no assistance, no relief. You can also have the opposite issue--an administrator whose only technique is to run roughshod over the student, backing them into a corner and trying to dominate them, all of which means that the student who returns to your classroom is just angrier and more disengaged.

Again, there's a trickle-down effect. If you know the office is not an available tool then you have to pick your battles very carefully, which can often mean a steady degrading of the atmosphere in the classroom. 

Can teachers be part of these problems? Of course. If you are sending kids to the office every hour of every day, something is wrong on your end. If you are using your classroom as your own personal soapbox every day, you are asking for angry parent calls. I rarely used the office, but when I needed it, I absolutely needed it. And I learned early on the value of pre-informing my boss if I was about to do something that might prompt a phone call; you can't expect an administrator to defend you from an angry phone call when they have no idea what the parent is talking about. 

But if there's a just-plain-not-up-to-it teacher in the building? Well, I am reminded of the Edward Deming insight-- if there's dead wood in your organization, was it dead when you hired it, or did you kill it? Bad employee problems are also ultimately management failures.

District administrators set a tone and mission for the school. Words don't mean much here; those things are set by the day to day operations. Your mission statement may not say "Our mission is to minimize the number of angry phone calls we get from parents," but your administrative behavior makes it loud and clear. Administrators show through action whether the district is supposed to run on fear or trust, personal responsibility or enforced compliance, focus on education or obsession with test scores. 

School administrator is a miserable job. Great responsibility that comes without great power. In some districts, not even great money; promoting from within is a great idea, but in my old district, a seasoned teacher stepping into an assistant principal job would take a pay cut to work more hours. And administrators themselves have to depend on others for the tools and support they need to do their jobs well.

But it's a critical job in every school in every district. Somehow, in the modern reform era, we haven't talked much about administrators. Who knows why not (hard to assess them via test scores with a straight face, don't have a large union some folks want to depower, fewer targets?) We don't know how many mediocre administrators are out there; certainly many are well-hidden by highly effective teaching staffs that have learned to work around them. And they can get better, like this guy who figured out that maybe he needed to listen to his staff. 

But to work for an unsupportive administration is isolating and demoralizing, making it that much harder for a teacher to do her best work.