August 15, 2023
Here is Alice, lost in Wonderland and seeking direction from the Cheshire Cat:
“Would you tell me, please, which way to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the cat.
“I don’t much care… .” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go,” said the cat.
“But so long as I get somewhere,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the cat, “if you only walk far enough.”
Perhaps your experiences with leadership in schools have been more inspiring than mine, but this exchange offers me a whimsical reminder of the essence of the leadership style of so many (not all) of the school leaders I have known. By school leaders, I mean all levels of leadership from head to toe. Most have had no sense of which way to go because they had no real destination in mind, nor did they even care much about the destination. They simply hoped to get somewhere, which they would manage to do if they hung on to the job long enough, doggedly plodding on, rather like our do-nothing politicians.
Several years ago, Head X had to leave campus for a few days to raise some money. He had no assistant head, so he left his academic director in charge with this instruction: “If anything comes up, just do something. It doesn’t really matter what.”
Most school leaders are a bit more subtle. They have adopted the clichés of vision-speak and take every opportunity to sound as though they have a destination—DEI, student-centered learning, social justice, project-based learning, health and wellness, empathy and compassion. But when it comes to making actual decisions, vision-speak becomes quickly divorced from substance. Deliberation and decisions tend to be ad hoc, cast adrift from any guiding principle or vision suggested by the clichés being spouted.
Here is a typical illustration: The Curriculum Committee is meeting—a collection of school leaders such as the school head, department heads, assistant head, and directors of this or that. The issue is whether to require that high school juniors take six courses for one term so that the arts can have more access to students. It is February, almost time to publish next year’s course catalog. In various ways, the faculty and this committee have spent several years, including this one, talking about the absurd student course loads, especially for juniors—the amount of homework, student exhaustion, the fragmentation of the curriculum, depth vs. breadth, the frantic schedule, the need for reflection. Not one syllable of these discussions or of the current vision-speak suggests that six courses make sense. But, well, the arts teachers are unhappy, and we’re only talking about one term, and we will carefully study the effects and reassess the entire curriculum and the schedule next year. And the clock is ticking: gotta publish this catalog, people, so let’s all be friends. So, of course, we decide the juniors will take six courses. And Head Y is silent, busy walking somewhere. Four years later, not only were the juniors still taking six courses for one term, they were taking six courses all year. As one colleague observed, “The side effects often happen without any oversight at all.”
Like the late George H. W. Bush, too many school leaders seem baffled by “the vision thing.” And the thing about vision is that the words do articulate an actual destination—specific outcomes that heads claim to want for their schools, that department chairs claim to want for their teachers, and that teachers claim to want for their students. Principles are involved, and these principles have real implications for what happens in a school. You would think that the principles would inform decisions.
If a school claims to believe that young people need to become independent thinkers, there are implications for how teachers teach, how students might be involved in shaping their schools, how adults and students relate to each other, and how the school uses time (the schedule). If a school claims to believe young people need to be creative, it’s not enough to require some arts courses. Nurturing and developing creativity have to be embedded in every course, in every department. And if a school believes in graduating scholars instead of water bugs, then requiring six courses and moving students through a gauntlet of frantic fifty-minute speed dates with teachers may not be the best decision.
We need school leaders—heads and trustees, principals and superintendents, deans and teachers—who know where they want to go: leaders discerning enough to distinguish between, on one hand, the emptiness of vision-speak that supports symbolic gestures, and, on the other, the substance of sound principles that support meaningful, coherent practices; leaders who have the integrity to make really difficult choices consistent with these principles. And we need schools comprised of leaders courageous enough to create a culture of candid discussion that encourages everyone to work together to implement a shared vision of education—a vision shaped by professional educators who have studied and understand the sciences of learning and human development.
The alternative is more of the status quo: the chaos of rudderless ad hoc decision-making—decisions that reflect not an intention to create a better school or department or learners but more mundane preoccupations: expediency (calm waters, no rocking boats), fear (primarily of criticism and losing a job), fundraising, reputation (especially, the college placement list), and a craving for affection. Most educators want to create good schools but fail to distinguish between desire and intention. And too many in leadership positions don’t understand the importance of the culture and courage required to transform intention into action. Nor do they appear to understand the urgent need for action. Our children continue to be the victims of a hundred years of stasis and hand-wringing. Yes, change must be careful, but it need not be so appallingly slow. We should all be concerned by the recent David Brooks/Douglas Hofstadter observation that “[artificial brains] are improving at an astounding rate, while human intelligence isn’t.”
Alice speaks for many of my colleagues when she says, “It would be so nice if something made sense for a change.”
You may also be interested in reading more articles written by Alden Blodget for Intrepid Ed News.
