Bloated Bureaucracy

Andrew Coulson of the Cato Institute has developed an Excel spreadsheet showing that the actual dollars spent per pupil by the District of Columbia Public Schools is more than $28,000. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/do-you-still-think-dc-spends-only-15000pupil/

In a post on the Cato Institute's website in February 2010, Mr. Coulson wrote:

If you’d like all the gory details, drawn from the official DC budget documents and the District’s own audited enrollment figures, then have a look at this Excel spreadsheet file. I’m happy to go over the calculation with any DC or DCPS official — or journalist — who would care to dispute it. (It’s only been challenged once before, and the official in question fell silent after seeing the spreadsheet.)

Interviewed by John Stossel, Coulson commented on the Byzantine nature of school funding:

School district budgets are so convoluted it’s almost as if they’re made to be confusing... DC has split up its education spending into seven different budgets, all of which go to k-12 public education, but only one of which is called “the DC Public School budget."

The next time you hear someone say our public schools are underfunded, keep that $28,000 figure in mind.

Shortage of Female Public School Administrators?

Mark your calendars! August 31st is the deadline for applications for the first time ever, Women in School Leadership Award, sponsored by the The American Association of School Administrators (AASA). From the AASA website:

Recognize an exceptional female administrator in your school system! This first-time offered AASA Women in School Leadership Award, sponsored by Farmers Insurance and AASA, pays tribute to the talent, creativity, and vision of outstanding women educational administrators in the nation’s public schools. http://www.aasa.org/WomensLeadership.aspx

In my own career, I've taught under eight principals, five women and three men. The women only AASA award is discriminatory, divisive, and unnecessary in an age when females make up a good percentage of public school administrators. Summarizing the results of the 1999-2000 Schools and Staff Survey conducted by National Center for Educational Statistics, Susan M. Gates, et al. of the Rand Corporation noted that the overral number of female public school principals had trended upward since the eighties. While the percentage of female principals in public high schools was still low, and while the percentage of principals was less than the rcentage of women in teaching, nevertheless 43.7% of all public school principals were women. According to Gates:

After years of concern about the representation of women in the principalship,the 1990s saw dramatic progress. By 1999–2000 . . . nearly half of all public school principals were women, as were over half of all new public school principals and all private school principals. "Who is Leading Our Schools? An Overview of School Administrators and their Careers," by Susan M. Gates, et al. (2003)
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1679/MR1679.ch3.pdf

I was unable to find references to any Schools and Staffing Survey more recent than the 1999-2000 survey. If anyone can point me to more recent data concerning the gender composition of public school principals and/or administrators, I'd be much obliged. Until then, my take on the AASA's Women in School Leadership Award is that it's a bit late to the party.

It's Not Rocket Science

So if teaching's not rocket science, what is it like? If it's not, in the words of educational psychologist Lee Schulman, "the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced,and frightening activity that our species has ever invented," then what is it like?

The best answer I've heard is that teaching, parenting, and counselling are alot alike. That observation comes from my sister, a homeschool mother of five who also has a master's degree in psychology and extensive experience counselling people with eating disorders. Another excellent description of teaching comes from Norman Atkins in his foreword to Doug Lemov's outstanding new book, "Teach Like a Champion." Atkins describes Lemov's study of outstanding teachers this way:

For the past dozen years, he has been standing in the back of hundreds of classrooms, watching thousands of hours of teachers' game films, analyzing their teaching moves with more enthusiasm and attention to detail than virtually anyone else in the history of American education . . . .

What he discovered is surprising for its simplicity and portends good news for the teaching profession . . . what he repeatedly saw and captured on video,beyond the no-shortcuts preparation and an essential mind-set of high expectations, were highly skilled individuals, working with a common, discrete set of tools, building systems of classroom culture and instruction, brick by brick.

We need to be realistic when we talk about teaching. A false view of teaching leads to unrealistic expectations and is a recipe for failure. When school superintendents and leaders such as Charlotte Danielson compare teaching to rocket science and claim that it is the hardest thing on the planet, bad consequences follow. The "teacher as rocket scientist" view of teaching allows administrators to set unrealistic expectations, to make everything harder and more complex, to disable, make dependent, and micromanage teachers, and to delegitimize common sense and personal experience.

Doug Lemov's new book, "Teach Like a Champion," is must reading for any teacher and is a welcome antidote to those who compare teaching to brain surgery or rocket science.