NYC Educator: Principals' Principles--How Low Can They Go?

NYC Educator: Principals' Principles--How Low Can They Go?

Principals' Principles--How Low Can They Go?

 I know principals who'd laugh at that picture. I know others who'd place their noses in the air and feign horror. They're way too important to entertain jokes about their Very Important Work. Of course, those who take themselves uber-seriously have enormous potential to be terrible leaders. There are all too many of them in NYC.

Everyone has opinions about school leaders. Michael Bloomberg believed in the imperial principal, a person who can do whatever he golly gosh darn pleases. He enabled this, in part, by establishing a legal department to advise them. Every chapter leader has heard about "legal." They're the people who present the principal with contract as menu. Choose the parts you like, they say. Ignore the rest.

This is, of course, a terrible situation. It precludes working hand in hand as teachers and school leadership should. UFT doesn't advise me to ignore rules and do whatever I want. On the other hand, UFT offers me accurate interpretations of the contract, as opposed to alternative facts.

A big question is what can be done about blatantly abusive school leaders. Sure, a lot of them have drunk Bloomberg's Kool-Aid, but some of them are way over the top. They're positively Trumpian in their intolerance of opinions differing from their own. Over at CPE 1, Monika Garg placed the UFT chapter leader and delegate on 3020a charges. It's like they were the resistance in some fascist regime, imprisoned without cause.

Garg thought her actions would intimidate and silence all who resisted her reign of terror. To the contrary, it energized the school community. Parents stood with UFT against her, and they just would not back down. Garg tried to ban parents from the school their children attended. Things got worse and worse, until someone at DOE with an iota of common sense moved the principal somewhere she could do no harm (or at least less harm).

There are other models. There is Forest Hills, and more recently La Guardia. Terrible leaders are brushed aside and sent elsewhere, to do whatever it is they do in Tweed. There is one thing these schools have in common. School communities united and took a stand against these leaders. This is a big ask for teachers, who didn't precisely sign up to be revolutionaries.

Nonetheless, if you push us too far, we will stand. We see this replicated all over the country, as teachers in red states walk rather than endure the slow death GOP lunatics envision for public education. We see it in multiple schools in the city. Of course, we don't see it everywhere.

Bad administrators are a plague here. I would not be at all surprised to learn that 25-40% of administrators ranged from inept to outright destructive. I know many readers of this CONTINUE READING: NYC Educator: Principals' Principles--How Low Can They Go?