I will confess to tremendous confusion about the actual skill level of principals, especially after reading a bunch of stuff about teacher evaluation and teacher labor markets (and whether principals should be able to hire teachers directly). Many of those who criticize the current state of teacher evaluation note that principals usually are poorly trained in evaluation, engage in drive-by observations, and give satisfactory ratings to almost every teacher. Yet the same people who criticize principals’ evaluation of teachers are often in favor of dramatic autonomy for principals in selecting teachers. I am confused: principals are incompetent at evaluating teachers, so we should give as much authority to them as possible in hiring?
In the comments on my entry about teacher evaluation policy debate ground rules, New York math teacher Jonathan writes, “Our current evaluation does not work well because administrators implement it poorly, not because it is inherently flawed. Why should teachers be punished (for that’s what the refomers’ schemes would do) for something that people other than teachers have messed up.” And then he proposes a vague transition to holistic review of teachers. Again, I’m confused: principals have screwed up massively, so let’s move from a checklist to an unstructured process where they’ll be important partners?
The common phrasing here sounds remarkably like rhetoric that frames the principal as simultaneously a doofus and an entrepreneur, someone in a 1980s suburban-teen flick or a turnaround artist, a petty tyrant or a serious partner in collaboration, or, let’s face it, a cipher moldable into whatever you think is necessary at the moment. In the early 1990s, Lynn Beck and Joe Murphy wrote a book about the changing metaphors used for principals, and I’m wondering how to think about the inconsistencies in how people write about principals. They should be functionaries in a giant bureaucracy aimed at achievement, I guess, and they can rise as far as their talents take them, but not to the top, which should be reserved for visionaries, and they can be trusted with all sorts of tasks.
The principal as eunuch, in other words.
It’s probably a saner goal to see principals as human beings with a certain set of skills, and like all of us, that set of skills can be impressive but is always finite. The concerns I always have about systems and proposals that rely heavily on a single role within a school is that people are variable, including principals. Setting up the principal as a hero is no better than setting up the teacher as a hero.