“Innocence” and Experience

In a post on the Education Week blog Inside School Research, veteran reporter Debra Viadero cites some intriguing conclusions and issues raised by Duke University researcher Helen F. Ladd’s new study of the relationship between teacher credentials (both traditional and alternative) and student performance.

Noting that most studies of this topic are old and concentrate on the elementary school level, she examined mandated end-of-course tests given to high school students in North Carolina.

Among her findings, quoted by Viadero, are that “measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter and have an… impact on student achievement… Teachers with an alternative license were slightly less effective than teachers with traditional licenses.”

It was also observed that “getting a high score on the subject-matter tests that teachers take for certification was linked to greater student learning gains… Teachers who were certified in the subject they taught were found to be more effective than those who were not.”

Some critics might argue that these conclusions are themselves inconclusive, were taken out of context or lend themselves to contradictory interpretations. But there is no rational cause for doubt.

Hopefully the parties to the debate are not so far apart on the spectrum of common sense that there is doubt that supervisors should be at least as expert in knowledge and teaching techniques as the subordinates whose performances they judge and whose careers they largely control. That should be a “given” among “traditionalists” and “reformers” alike. But it is not.

In a cynical and ironic effort to restore school principals to their rightful role as instructional leaders, some major schools systems nationwide have eliminated teaching experience as a job requirement and replaced it with a pre-civil service eligibility based on cronyism and subscription to narrow ideas that in some respects resemble a cult.

Flying high as a supervisor can be an almost overnight affair even before one has earned one’s “wings” in the classroom.

Until less than a decade ago, successful candidates for principal invariably had at least a dozen years experience as a teacher and assistant principal. An increasing number of new principals are hardly adults themselves.

Nobody should be become a principal until they have passed muster in the classroom and competed in an open process in which backgrounds are screened and unrigged interviews held with administrators, teachers and parents, as was standard before appointments were replaced with anointments.

Apart from demoralization and educational failure, the consequences of a topsy-turvy system can bring some tragic-comedic relief, as in the following true situations:

A veteran music teacher who had been a child prodigy and whose own musical compositions were lauded by a major media critic, (and whose teaching style and effectiveness were almost universally praised by colleagues, parents and students) got a “U” rating from a principal who didn’t know how to read musical notes and who had been a laughingstock for the two years that she was a teacher. Knowing the extremely bad odds of a principal’s professional judgment being successfully challenged, no matter how ignorant and biased, this teacher left the system in disgust.

In the same school, the position of science department supervisor defaulted to the principal’s favorite crony. He didn’t know biology from black magic, chemistry from clairvoyance, or geology from gee-whiz. But at behest of the principal, who wanted to give the job to the relative of a friend, he drove out a teacher who had an engineering degree and had entered the profession as a second career after 20 years as a senior Defense Department scientist.

The social studies supervisor who knew nothing about history, geography and economics but everything about ambition and career networking fulfilled her mandate of rating teachers unsatisfactory who had forgotten in any given day more knowledge than the supervisor ever possessed.

The principal herself, who couldn’t write a coherent letter to the Parent Association without the intercession of that virtual angel called “Spell Check” ruled an English teacher “incompetent” after he had earned satisfactory ratings for more consecutive years than had elapsed since the principal had been conceived in her own mother’s womb.

How is it that these principals have lost perspective on themselves? Perhaps we should be more forgiving. They are, after all, not fully grown up yet, even though the Dept. of Ed. has given them a “pass.”

Tagged: administration