A really good  teacher I worked with for years in a challenged school community, contacted me at the closure of a stint in an international school.  Apparently, the school elsewhere endured under the direction of a difficult administrator as well as the one we had just endured together.  He asked how does this happen in education?  How do we keep bumping into schools stressed by the constrictions an administrator who has his focus on administration, really not student learning - nor the conditions that facilitate teachers' practice?

We know as teachers we are devoted to facilitating conditions of learning for our kids. What gets in the way and how is it allowed?

I suspect that some district somewhere expanded the wrong fork in the road and led everyone else astray: administrivia was once completed by the building's "principal Teacher" - AKA the Lead Teacher, the most experienced teacher, the communitiy's master teacher.  Since this person was also a practicing teacher, focus remained on student learning and teachers' ability to practice and grow in their craft. This kept data and bureaucracy to a minimum.  Then oops "administration" became a full time job with assistants even!  Whatever we make space for grows...especially when we feed it...


Time now to put first things first...kids real and ever-changing needs, creative pedagogy, teaching as an extended apprenticeship, master teachers as mentors -assessing, guiding, coaching the developmental practice of apprentices ... all leading to allowing kids to develop according to their strengths and their pace.  Let's put the focus of schools on engaged learning, the reciprocal practice of learners-teachers, craft sharing, and pedagogy.  Let's let educators design schools (not corporate or political entities) so that schools can practice according to sound educational  foundations and research.

• How do administrative goals, needs, and favorites become system-wide decisions, to the functional exclusion of those who practice School's Craft every day?  
• How do administrators at all four levels override everything teachers know to be true? At the local building and district and state and federal levels?
• How do the needs and wants of a MANufactured  bureaucracy take precedence over that which experienced classroom teachers know to be true?
• How does "the king's need" for numbers and quantity assurance become systematized, squeezing out the life of solidly good pedagogy?  (This thinking and resulting structure reflects a "hierarchy" in which the "special" one's needs matter more than everyone else's authentic needs. Has our modern world outgrown this yet???
• How do we graduate systematically from a hierarchy model to one of INTERDEPENDENCE?