Flat Only Works As a Metaphor
2 min read
This message from Don Watkins led me to Larry Cuban's recent post on school principals as instructional leaders.
The gist of Cuban's piece is that principals have varied and wide-ranging responsibilities that create an innate tension: doing one aspect of the job requires giving another aspect short shrift. This tension can be apparent as principals attempt to balance their pedagogical responsibilities alongside the managerial tasks required to run a successful school.
As Cuban says:
Calls for principals to be CEOs can be heard from superintendents, pundits, and others who couldn’t last a week heading a preschool center. Tensions between managerial and instructional duties of principals never go away. Seldom mentioned are important political tasks in working with parents, mobilizing teachers, dealing with community social service agencies, police, etc. What does change are expectations of principals–today CEOs, tomorrow political actors in school community, the following week, instructional leaders.
As Don Watkins implies, the notion of a single principal doing it all needs revising. People expect more of principals, and the reality is that admin and support staff positions (counselors, guidance counselors, nurses, office support, etc) have been slashed, and principals have shouldered much of the increased work resulting from these cuts.
But the notion of eliminating hierarchies and getting "flat" has currency as a buzzword, but it doesn't match what people and schools actually need. We all aren't experts in everything. Rather than eliminating hierarchies, we should look for sensible ways to empower people within their domains. Rather than a flat world without hierarchies, we need to recognize the professional competence of people working within schools. People need authority to their jobs well, and good supervision is part of the equation. As we move forward with changing the structure of our educational system, the relationship between principals and teachers - something that can be adversarial, at least partly due to how teacher's unions bargain for teacher's rights - needs to be re-examined and reworked.
But we don't need to flatten anything. That's a task best left to bulldozers, and pundits. We need to build structures where professionals have the authority to do the work we expect them to do.
