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Three priorities for our new school board
The April 26 school board meeting, the first at which the four new board members were active, was nothing if not eye-opening. Certainly the era of 9-0 votes is over. Our hope is that the bad-tempered public comment made by an existing board member to one of the newly elected members will not become the new norm. New board president Mark Berry will have his hands full. At the same meeting a former Holland Brook secretary stood up to read a single-spaced four page indictment of the working environment at that school. It was covered in the Hunterdon Democrat, although one had to be there for the full experience. Judging from some of the looks shot out from those behind the tables to certain members of the public audience, our school leaders may have finally come to the understanding that this is all too real. It isn’t just one school, or one incident, or a small minority of loudmouth parents and teachers. We have a problem. For eight months our school leaders and a cadre of hangers-on have fired on the messengers while the messengers shouted over the blare. Now, perhaps, the message has been heard during the lull of reloading. Another article on this site detailed four steps between mediocre and exceptional performance in our district: empowering our teachers, engaging our students, evaluating meaningful learning, and improving communication. These still hold true, but we need to assign priority to fixing three immediate problems so that, as board president Mark Berry pointed out, we can return the focus on our children. Our school leaders must address these three areas as soon as possible:
Let’s examine these three areas briefly. Heavy handed administrative staff The administrative staff has presented some sickening and well-documented performances of late. Examples have been documented on this website, in the Hunterdon Democrat, and in public board meetings. Our superintendent has been rehired for three years at a salary that would be attractive to the chief executive of any private sector organization of the same size. It is time to take the difficult but necessary action of a chief executive faced with such performances: a scrupulous house cleaning. It is lonely at the top for a reason. Now is not the time to blanch at hard decisions or to make compromises. There can be no compromise with poison or with poisonous behavior. Our school board must encourage this house cleaning and back the hard decisions that must be made if we are to find our way back to the children. Teacher morale The morale of the teaching staff, also well documented, continues to decline. Turnover has not appreciably slowed and resignations due to unsavory working conditions continue. It came up again in the April 26 board meeting, due in part to another letter from a specialist who felt mistreated. Concrete steps must be taken to stop the bleeding. A review of management practices would be an obvious start. Exit interviews should be requested of those already leaving. Management by walking around should become the norm. A peace offering of doubling the discretionary funds available for teachers in the 2005-2006 school year would require re-allocating only a tenth of one percent of our budget. A bright new spotlight shining on the work of teachers who have sacrificed to be a buffer between poor management and inspired learning could help turn around morale. Scripted learning The culture of scripted learning is a reference to the practices that prevent exceptional teachers, inspired staff, and Readington students from reaching their full potential. Scripted learning is based on the usually unspoken notions that teachers need to be given daily scripts in order to stay on task, that students need extrinsic reward systems in order to participate in learning, and that administrators need “objective” testing data in order to truly evaluate students and programs. The culture of scripted learning is the educational equivalent of a factory assembly line circa 1910. It suggests that teachers are unable or unwilling to create inspired and differentiated lessons on their own, that children are unable or unwilling to explore new horizons without a bribe, and that administrators cannot trust either party to accurately assess progress. The culture of scripted learning is not unique to Readington, but it has become more entrenched due to the effects of our other issues described above. After all, heavy handed administrators tend to encourage the establishment of “Stepford” teachers. Dehumanized, robotic teachers tend to fall short of inspired, differentiated teaching. In such an atmosphere, students may learn to take tests well and that may please the administration…but how helpful will this type of learning be when these children grow into adults? Our board members must understand that our classrooms are becoming homogenized. We are setting up a system in which great numbers of students who have difficulty following scripted learning are labeled as either “gifted” or “classified” and sent along on another track. That leaves the remaining children in the primary classrooms that are prodded along with token economies, poked with extra standardized testing, and beaten down with lessons read from a mass-produced program in order to shape them into a deep-seated kind of ordinary. When inspired teachers attempt to break out of this mold, the heavy-handed administrators are there to herd them back to their corral. Three immediate issues should be front and center in the discussions between our school board and our administration. Show, don’t tell. |
