otoh

I have never wanted to be a school administrator. I have worked for some really good ones and a couple really bad ones and I wouldn’t want to trade places with any of them. But I have left jobs as a direct result of their actions.

I have a deep distrust of administrators with little classroom experience. (What I find even more scary is that some schools are hiring administrators with no classroom experience at all. Ack!) But even with several years of classroom time under their belts, too many of them suffer from what I like to call administrative amnesia — they forget what it was like. They are no longer tied to the bell schedule or a roomful of students. And when it is no longer part of their daily experience, it too easily drops low in (or out of) their decision-making.

Bill Gates is not one of my favorite people, although I have to respect that he is using his wealth and influence to try to improve world health. A few years ago I read his book, Business @ the Speed of Thought. I wrote down a couple quotes at the time and two of them have been bouncing around my head lately.

The old saying “Knowledge is Power” sometimes makes people hoard knowledge. They believe that knowledge hoarding makes them indespensable. Power comes not from knowledge kept, but from knowledge shared. A company’s values and reward system should reflect that idea. [My emphasis.]

Information enables good employees to shine. Information creates accountability. Information eliminates excuses.

You might think that in the field of education such concepts would be basic to our operation. Sadly, school administration is a huge bureaucracy that, I think, gets in the way of us doing our job. And while I don’t think schools can run like most other businesses (I’ll rant about that some other time) that doesn’t mean we have nothing to learn from them. Especially since administration is sort of the “business end” of the process.

Administrators have to make decisions that affect my daily life. They can (and usually do) do this without asking for my input. They can even choose to withhold informing me of their decisions for some period of time. They can do that just so there is less time they have to listen to my opinions or, in fact, for no reason at all. But, just because they can doesn’t make it right.

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