Trust and Obey
Years ago, someone in my district's Central Office read a study showing that teachers who had to call their principals to let them know they'd be absent were less likely to take a day off than those who had to call someone else--a substitute coordinator, say, or a building secretary.
This was in the days before answering machines were standard-issue in most homes and automated sub-finder services did not exist. Thinking he could save a few bucks, the superintendent instituted a system where teachers had to call their building principals two hours--preferably more--before their report time. The principals, in turn, would contact the nice lady at the switchboard who handled securing substitutes.
This effectively turned a single step process (teacher calls, coordinator gets sub) into a multi-step relay process (teachers call, principal calls, coordinator gets subs) wherein messages about teachers' preferred subs or where to find the plan book were not directly transmitted, and often garbled. Instead of a steady stream of sub requests, the switchboard now got them in late-arriving clusters, and securing subs became a kind of Lucy-and-Ethel race against time.
There were two things about this system far worse than inefficiency, however: First, the superintendent sent a clear warning signal to every teacher that their absences were under suspicion, and being rigorously fly-specked by their immediate supervisors. And in the process, he'd made mornings in principals' households a living hell.
My own principal lived about 90 minutes from school, so he was often on the road before the two-hour deadline. Privately, he'd asked his teachers not to call after 8:00 p.m. the night before (they had a new baby)--so it was his sleep-deprived wife who was fielding the 4:30 a.m. calls from hacking, sniffling teachers. I can still hear her curt "Yisss?" and slam-down of the receiver.
We never did learn whether the system yielded any cost savings. But when my principal became superintendent, a couple of years later, we returned to calling a sub coordinator. By then, the district Trust and Obey - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher:
