The teaching principal ‘cure’

In the Dec. 15 issue of the Bangor Daily News, Maine’s taxpayers learned that $43 million more is needed because this state’s shrinking public school enrollment isn’t shrinking fast enough. For those who spent decades in school administration, “that does not compute!”

What is surprising is that today’s researchers and statisticians can’t do school enrollment and related financial projections that were taught to graduate students of school administration 40 years ago. Shrinking public school enrollment is, of course, a reflection of overall socioeconomic conditions and not just the quality of today’s public schooling under the leadership of a substantial state bureaucracy and more than 150 superintendents overseeing nearly 300 SAUs with fewer than 200,000 pupils. The “need” for significantly increased revenues to support Maine’s nearly 700 public schools with shrinking enrollments is another matter.

Since the state’s budgetary problems related to public education seem to be those of organizational distortion, if not mutation, combined with bad math, maybe it is time for Maine’s public sector to take a page from the private sector. Annually, private companies avoid bankruptcy by downsizing and reorganizing. If those moves are good enough for the likes of GM, Ford and this state’s still operating paper manufacturers, they are good enough for Maine’s Department of Education.

Where to start? Why not start with the fact that Maine has 45 percent more principals per student than the national average?

Having entered public pedagogy as a teaching principal, my approach to school management had to be compatible with my role as a teacher. Few of today’s teaching immune principals are likely to agree but there are advantages to being a teaching principal not found in supervisory principalships. One of those advantages is being one of the teachers and unable to use a principalship as an excuse to escape the role of teacher.

Those now behind their computer-adorned office desks who spent years in teaching wanting to get out of classrooms and into offices probably do not see teaching and administration as being complementary and that is a shame. Those who do not see that relationship devaluate both teaching and school administration. Not only does all administrative activity have an effect on teaching; each administrative act should positively affect teaching and no administrative act should have a negative impact on teaching.

Anyone who thinks that the teaching principals of small schools are doomed to drudgery needs to get out in the real world where workers, including the majority of public school pupils’ parents, do not mind having others see them sweat. Those who have been teaching principals and have found such assignments doable have also found that the dual roles do not have to be in constant conflict.

Teaching principalships in small rural schools offer much more than reduced school budgets and fewer opportunities for wasteful admin-istrative featherbedding. Creative teaching principals have enough time to be creative while those who are not creative are neither creative as principals nor as teachers. Teaching principals have enough time to be leaders, stewards, supporters and facilitators.

However, they do not have the time to procrastinate, look for problems that don’t exist, ignore problems that do exist, or overuse and abuse such personal pronouns as I, me and mine, or the adjective my.

Our so-called public school “system” has been deluged with and burdened by paper “standards” piled on top of paper “standards.” On the other hand, there do not appear to be any standards for separating cost-effective nonteaching principals from cost-effective teaching principals in very small schools with fewer than 200 pupils. Maybe we need to spend more time questioning what we are spending on public schooling in terms of what our children are getting in return and less time adding to our “Tower of Babel,” that is encumbered by mandated convoluted curricula that come and go like the fads of faddism they are.

Questioning the educational and economic ineffectiveness of administrative featherbedding in public education is not flatlander foolishness.

The summary of the Maine State Board of Education’s own 2005 Select Panel report begins, “Maine’s schools are not ready for the 21st century… [and] significant … change must occur…” It follows with, “Maine is one of the most expensive public school systems in the nation and yet our results … are flat … Maine’s schools are the eighth most expensive in the nation [in spite of] declining students numbers … The average Maine school in 2000-2001 had 290 students in comparison to the national average of 506 … Maine’s K-12 public school systems has one FTE (full-time equivalent) educator per 6.2 students – second lowest among the 50 states, and our administrator to student ratio places us among the lowest as well. In 2000-2001, Maine had one administrator per 393 students [while] the national average was one per 816 … Maine has 33 percent more educational employees than the national average [and] twice the number of school district officials per students than the average. …”

It appears there are only about 50 teaching principals in the state’s K-8 units. That means that more than 90 percent of Maine’s elementary schools, the vast majority of which are very small by national standards, have nonteaching principals.

Furthermore, who knows how many, if any, of today’s supervising principals see themselves as substitute teachers of first resort when full-time teachers are on paid absences during Maine’s state 175-day agrarian-era school year.

Eliminating nonteaching supervising principals in Maine’s hundreds of small K-8 schools wouldn’t offset inflated administrative costs but it would help and be “a gift that keeps on giving.” More time in classroom teaching means less time for managerial mischief and minutia.

Even where teaching principalship supplementary compensations are contractually protected because, after all, those in such positions are fellow teachers or, if one prefers, union brothers and sisters, few taxpayers or their elected school board members would be so naive or so fiscally irresponsible as to pay a teaching principal 200 percent of that person’s base pay as a teacher.

Should such generosity of cronyism or nepotism break out, there is always next year’s town meeting, school board election and school budget vote.

Leonard C. Harlow, Ed.D. is a resident of Carmel.