Why public-school structure fosters fear and failure for administrators, teachers and students
“We’ve called for your observation,” Principal Brown said to Oliver, “and for some reason they won’t give it to us. And our admin is very upset because we need that observation before we actually give you one.” (Emphasis added.)
In light of later developments in Oliver’s story, multiple terms in that statement — “our admin,” “very upset,” and “we need that observation before we actually give you one” — merit much closer examination.
— from Part 4: What went down at Treem ES
Let us examine that statement, element by element.
- ‘Our admin’: In context, this term clearly suggests the involvement of a midlevel district administrator — someone above the Beckley principal and vice principal, but somewhere below the level of the CCSD superintendent. Either Beckley’s administrators contacted that midlevel administrator for instructions, or the midlevel manager contacted Beckley to ensure a particular course of action was followed. In either case, it reveals some measure of administrator concern.
- ‘very upset’: In using this term, Beckley’s principal revealed that Oliver’s new presence was producing even more than a modicum of anxiety within some administrators. While we don’t know what exactly triggered that anxiety, or with whom it was primarily located — within Beckley‘s administrators, within the midlevel district manager or with the district superintendent — it is clear that alarm bells were ringing. On the face of it, it was the midlevel manager feeling the most pressure. Was that pressure coming from above — to, specifically, ensure that the “dirty” Treem observation remained in Oliver’s personnel folder? Was that how CCSD managers planned to “disappear” Oliver from the district? That indeed, followed in due course — forestalling, for almost two years, the public revelations of the district’s grading corruption.
- ‘We need that observation before we actually give you one’: This sentence — like the somewhat-bizarre operating rule it expresses — highlights the existing rigidity of CCSD’s administrative culture (even in the face of ostensible directives from a new district superintendent). It reveals how firmly institutionalized is the lack of principal discretion, and thus its consequence: the subtle fear that pervades administrative ranks. Principals, vice principals and midlevel managers all come to realize the vulnerability of their careers in a frequently corrupt district — whether from those in the hierarchy above them, or from those below, ultimately in the ranks of idealistic, unhappy or even possibly whistleblowing, teachers.
The Gap
Such anxiety — in an intrinsically political (because ultimately government) organization — is a natural byproduct of the large gap between how CCSD and other massive school districts present themselves to the public, and what they’ve actually become.
Their self-description, of course, is that they are educational institutions. But, as this report will show — and most Americans in recent decades have more and more come to understand — the actual education of students is today increasingly only a secondary or even tertiary goal, among the many others pursued by the modern, heavily bureaucratized and regulated public-school state monopolies.
Speaking practically, their actual primary function and goal is to simply continue collecting and spending public money for the personal benefit of all those employed by the monopolies — quite independently of whether or not those moneys actually accomplish the purpose for which these state monopolies were even first formed.
These monopoly districts, thus, are primarily administrative institutions, within which a distinct administrative class, while anxious, still reigns supreme. And while its nominal role is to facilitate and foster student learning, in practice that is defined as the administrators directing and controlling a clearly subordinate class — still known as “teachers” — in the implementation upon students of detailed instructional regimes blanket-approved by state politicians but concocted by distant, tinkering, ideological enthusiasts.
Of these instructional regimes, the often-dysfunctional, already failing, Common Core State Standards initiative is only the latest example. In Nevada as elsewhere, it was imposed by oblivious, herd-following state-level politicians and careerist bureaucrats. Eager to conform to the latest unproven, fad-borne “fix” for public education’s chronic failures, they thereby get to look “good,” while keeping their public jobs.
For the distant tinkerers, however, their goal and enthusiasm is clear: even more national and unified control over the education of America’s young.
That’s about as far away as one can get from the better-informed viewpoints of the primary experts on, and advocates for, young students’ individual needs and learning natures — their parents.
Thus, while the nominal purpose for the funds that state legislators allocate to districts is to ensure an educated citizenry, control over the use of those taxpayer dollars is kept away from the particular portion of the citizenry that is most motivated to accomplish that very purpose.
Instead, in the political dogfight over spoils, it is the districts’ administrative class that ends up with the most effective control of those funds — which leads, unsurprisingly, to that class itself reaping the primary financial benefit of those state funds.
For such a regime to endure within a nominal democracy where public schools have been failing families for decades, is, thus, a citizen-provoking anomaly. To bridge it, some process of public disinformation — miseducation, if you will — is clearly required.
Toward that end, various public myths have been fostered and reinforced, keeping the public itself distracted, ignorant and oblivious as to the systemic causes of the chronic failure of their public-school tax dollars.
Let’s examine one critically important myth that still persists — decades after the reality behind it changed — having to do with principals.
While the public tends to assume that public-school principals are essentially lords of their domains, with authority over virtually all that goes on within their schools, that’s actually not the case.
Instead, they’re much more controlled creatures of rule-bound bureaucracies, and thus vulnerable to the random political blowups that can suddenly nuke a public-school administrator’s career.
As John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe showed in an important analysis of the structural conditions within which most public education nowadays operates, public-school principals are systematically denied much of what it takes to actually provide education leadership for the schools they nominally run:
Thus, while the nominal purpose for the funds that state legislators allocate to districts is to ensure an educated citizenry, control over the use of those taxpayer dollars is kept away from the particular portion of the citizenry that is most motivated to accomplish that very purpose.
Instead, in the political dogfight over spoils, it is the districts’ administrative class that ends up with the most effective control of those funds — which leads, unsurprisingly, to that class itself reaping the primary financial benefit of those state funds.
For such a regime to endure within a nominal democracy where public schools have been failing families for decades, is, thus, a citizen-provoking anomaly. To bridge it, some process of public disinformation — miseducation, if you will — is clearly required.
Toward that end, various public myths have been fostered and reinforced, keeping the public itself distracted, ignorant and oblivious as to the systemic causes of the chronic failure of their public-school tax dollars.
Let’s examine one critically important myth that still persists — decades after the reality behind it changed — having to do with principals.
While the public tends to assume that public-school principals are essentially lords of their domains, with authority over virtually all that goes on within their schools, that’s actually not the case.
Instead, they’re much more controlled creatures of rule-bound bureaucracies, and thus vulnerable to the random political blowups that can suddenly nuke a public-school administrator’s career.
As John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe showed in an important analysis of the structural conditions within which most public education nowadays operates, public-school principals are systematically denied much of what it takes to actually provide education leadership for the schools they nominally run:
Thus, while the nominal purpose for the funds that state legislators allocate to districts is to ensure an educated citizenry, control over the use of those taxpayer dollars is kept away from the particular portion of the citizenry that is most motivated to accomplish that very purpose.
Instead, in the political dogfight over spoils, it is the districts’ administrative class that ends up with the most effective control of those funds — which leads, unsurprisingly, to that class itself reaping the primary financial benefit of those state funds.
For such a regime to endure within a nominal democracy where public schools have been failing families for decades, is, thus, a citizen-provoking anomaly. To bridge it, some process of public disinformation — miseducation, if you will — is clearly required.
Toward that end, various public myths have been fostered and reinforced, keeping the public itself distracted, ignorant and oblivious as to the systemic causes of the chronic failure of their public-school tax dollars.
Let’s examine one critically important myth that still persists — decades after the reality behind it changed — having to do with principals.
While the public tends to assume that public-school principals are essentially lords of their domains, with authority over virtually all that goes on within their schools, that’s actually not the case.
Instead, they’re much more controlled creatures of rule-bound bureaucracies, and thus vulnerable to the random political blowups that can suddenly nuke a public-school administrator’s career.
As John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe showed in an important analysis of the structural conditions within which most public education nowadays operates, public-school principals are systematically denied much of what it takes to actually provide education leadership for the schools they nominally run:
It may be better to think of the public-school principal as a lower-level manager than as a leader. In the public sector, the principal is a bureaucrat with supervisory responsibility for a public agency. Most of the important decisions about policy have been taken by higher authorities: they set the goals and the principal is expected to administer them. Many of the important structural decisions are also taken by higher authorities: the principal is bound by all sorts of formal rules and regulations that dictate aspects of internal structure. And many of the important personnel decisions are imposed from above as well: the principal is unlikely to have much control over the choice of teachers or the incentives that motivate them. The real leaders of the public school are the authorities, not the principal. (Emphasis added.)
The rise of rule-following bureaucrats
The reality is that successive generations of politicians — for over a century — have ever-increasingly made principals into rule-following bureaucrats, rather than education leaders. Note Chubb and Moe:
Authorities want principals to ensure that formal hierarchical directives are put into effect; they do not want principals to exercise real discretion. The public system is set up accordingly. The position of principal is a bureaucratic office in a recognized hierarchy of offices. (Emphasis added.)
Consequently, although much of the public still tends to see principals as leaders who determine how successful their schools will be, in today’s state systems those expectations are not realistic. Not only has autonomy been largely engineered out of the principal’s position, but the selective processes of administration-centric systems also work to keep natural teacher-leaders out of those positions to begin with.
Because teacher-leaders not only need autonomy but also the discretion to serve the individual instructional needs of students, their mere existence threatens the basic admin principle of control.
Thus, we arrive at today’s rule-bound, bureaucratic systems that reflexively kill the love of learning in both teachers and students. The politically-correct imposition of Common Core — now increasingly recognized as a debacle that has damaged student learning — is a classic case in point.
The gap between pretense & reality yields cheating
Given the major gap between the pretense and reality of so many modern public-school systems — think of the recent frauds documented in Atlanta, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago, to start — it’s little wonder that bureaucracy-bound administrators can easily find themselves at risk, personally.
Under heavy pressure from higher-ups to show excellent student-achievement results — but lacking the personal leadership attributes, training, teachers, students and school cultures that would yield such results — principals, in the age of educationist “accountability,” can easily be tempted into cheating strategies.
Often such cheating is rationalized as merely temporary — “just until we catch the students up to where they ought to be.” That particular justification was advanced by perpetrators of the Atlanta Public Schools testing frauds, Philadelphia’s frauds as well as CCSD’s own 2012 Matt Kelly ES test-erasure scandal. It also was put forward in-house at Harriett Treem ES in 2018 and 2019 to justify its administration’s grade-changing deceptions.
Even when the cheating is not immediately recognized, its effects remain ruinous. It’s a betrayal — by teachers, principals and district brass — of the children given into their care and the parents who entrusted their children to the school district. Consequently, out of the perpetrators’ own now-prostituted integrity, there spreads throughout the school district and out into the community a miasma of demoralization — like that already documented among CCSD teachers.
That toxicity penetrates even deeper, as the principals and administrators who embraced the original cheats now face another existential risk: For them, honest and deeply committed teachers and other possible whistleblowers become a looming threat — constituting not only likely sources of social contempt, but also of possible public disclosure, professional disgrace and legal prosecution. Thus, these teachers, too, “need,” at the least, to be intimidated and suppressed, or even somehow expelled entirely from the school system.
It is not surprising, therefore, that America’s administrator-heavy, bureaucratic public-school systems continue, decade after decade, to fail to improve — despite the ever-increasing money routed their way.
The reason — although ostentatiously ignored for decades — is that the centralized, rule-maximizing and administrator-centric approach to education flies in the teeth of what research has long demonstrated about the characteristics of effective schools.
Way back in 1986, Eric A. Hanushek summarized the findings of key studies from 1971, 1975, 1976, 1981 and 1986, noting that they were “unequivocal: Teachers and schools differ dramatically in their effectiveness.” (Emphasis in the original.)
Yet, America’s political class — willfully indifferent and slavishly kowtowing to the existing public-school-interest groups that feed off taxpayers and fund the reelections of that same political class — has increasingly tightened a rule-maximizing, administrator-centric system that blocks effective teaching.
Indeed, this information has been known for at least a quarter century, but cynically ignored and suppressed.
The ground-breaking Administrator and Teacher Survey (ATS)
The conclusive research on school effectiveness that makes this clear was conducted in the 1980s and is known as the Administrator and Teacher Survey questionnaire. Its results appeared in book form as Politics, Markets & America’s Schools — which was published in 1990 by the Brookings Institution. The then-president of Brookings, Bruce K. MacLaury, wrote the foreword.
The ATS consortium’s research team had started with the data compiled by famed James-Coleman-administered High School and Beyond (HS&B) reports, and then dug even deeper. The researchers had the intelligence to break the school-achievement results found earlier by HS&B into four quartiles, ranking them highest-achieveing to lowest.
Then, from the schools in the top and bottom achievement quartiles, approximately 17,000 administrators and teachers were recruited to participate anonymously in the survey, answering its questions.
The researchers’ goal was to identify the actual conditions that allow teachers and administrators to operate most effectively in support of genuine student achievement.
Consequently, the 1990 book by Chubbs and Moe was able to report multiple highly enlightening empirical findings — many of which are presented in chart form.
While the entire book is highly illuminating, the four charts below conclusively show the extremely high correlation between above-average administrative control over administrators and teachers with the ineffectiveness of school organizations.