Getting Out of Our Own Way

Eduwank guest blogger Chris Cerf has another insightful piece up, this time on responsbility and accountability.

There is no greater path to madness than holding someone accountable and then not giving him or her the authority to deliver. By the same token, a central lesson from the early years of the charter school movement is that autonomy without meaningful accountability is equally misguided.

I suspect that if you talk to school principals and vice principals, the greatest headeaches in their daily work is not teachers or students or even helicopter parents, but REMFs (as the military used to call them, "Rear Echelon Mother F'ers"), the central school administration bureaucrats who need to justify their existence by hassling the front line school administrators.

The opposite of accountability is authority, and for far too many principals in our schools today, they lack a great deal of authority. Assuming a principal is empowered to hire teachers, they certainly don't have the ability to fire them due to procedures enshrined in most union contracts. So to whom are teachers accountable? Principals are held accountable for their budgets, to a certain extent, yet they have no authority to contract for services outside a very limited area. Principals are accountable to the parents and students in their charge, but have no authority to really make changes and accomodations necessary to effect a student's education. For example, in most school districts, individual education plans, required under federal law for special ed students, usually have to be finalized by the district, and the student's principal has little if any direct involvement, despite probably having a pretty good grasp of what she can provide and what she can't provide in the way of services.

Assuming some of these matters are properly within the realm of the school principal, why aren't more schools taking a page from New York City and decentralizing administration of schools. Empower principals to make decisions would seem to be the purpose of principals, otherwise, why seek to have principals have so many credentials and just hire a "yes man" for the Superintendent and central bureaucracy as save a few thousand dollars a year in salary.

Here are the areas in which a principal should have control:

1. Hiring AND firing of staff, including teachers and support staff. Greivance procedures should include appeals to a central authority.
2. Budgetary control, including control over all non-salary items. Large district wide contracts such as food service or transportation would probably be restricted, but other items, including maintenance, textbooks, groundskeeping, etc should be lef to the principal and she should be held fully accountable for results.
3. Scheduling and time management (within guidelines provided by central office of things like bussing)
4. Scheduling of school resources for non-school related groups--a lot of churches and community groups use the school spaces and the school should control their spaces

This is a small list and may be longer, but in the end, the principal must be prepared to defend all decisions to both parents and the school board.

It is not rocket science and should empower and reward principals to do the best they can, but that can only be done if the central bureaucracy lets go a little.