{"id":1874,"date":"2010-03-23T18:38:06","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T01:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/?p=1874"},"modified":"2010-03-23T18:38:34","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T01:38:34","slug":"it%e2%80%99s-the-governance-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.leftyparent.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/23\/it%e2%80%99s-the-governance-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the Governance, Stupid!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"CircleIn the Education Week<\/em> March 19 article, \u201cIt’s the Classroom, Stupid: School Reform Where It Counts the Most\u201d<\/a>, author Kalman R. Hettleman is at least attempting to address the issue of governance that I highlighted in my piece yesterday on \u201cDefining Governance\u201d<\/a>. Hettleman says…<\/p>\n

The mismanagement of classroom instruction is the ugly secret and fatal flaw of school reform. Everyone knows that school systems are horrendously mismanaged. The media keep us fully informed and outraged at foul-ups like overspent budgets, computer glitches, bungled paperwork, defective maintenance, and unresponsive bureaucrats. But these failings, as serious as they are, tell only a small part of the story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Though he does not use the \u201cG-word\u201d, I believe what he is addressing in his article speaks directly to school governance, specifically who is empowered to make school management decisions and what is the process for making those decisions.
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\nAccording to Hettleman, schools lack good management because educators (teachers, principals, and others) are not taught management skills in college or on the job, and are in fact predisposed to be weak managers because of their personal temperament to strive to \u201cnurture the growth of children\u201d along with \u201ctheir professional culture of insularity\u201d.
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\nSpecifically to temperament, Hettleman says that most educators \u201care more at ease with informal and collegial, rather than formal and hierarchical, relationships, and they resist being squeezed into a corporate-management mold\u201d. Essentially, that they are not good soldiers, not trained to follow the orders of their superiors. I strongly disagree with his point here, recalling that the teachers that had the greatest positive impact in my life tended to be more informal, more about relationships (with their students) than rules, and more free-agents than compliant worker-bees.
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\nRegarding their professional culture, he says that teachers tend to want to isolate themselves in their classrooms with their students, away from parents, politicians and management experts whom they see as \u201cgrandstanding quarterbacks that constantly second-guess their own expertise\u201d. This speaks to what I would say is the hierarchical top-down, \u201ccommand and control\u201d nature of educational governance, where teachers (at the lower end of the pyramid of control) are generally not empowered to make their own professional judgments, but expected to follow the dictates of their \u201csuperiors\u201d.
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\nFurther, Hettleman says that school reformers don\u2019t pay attention to this lack of management skills. I would reframe that assertion to say that school reformers (along with most everyone else) do not pay attention to school governance (or governance in general). Who is empowered to make decisions and what the process is to make those decisions is in my opinion the unheralded key to success or failure of most of our contemporary institutions. Teachers are not slaves, serfs or trained monkeys, but members of an educated citizenry that can contribute greatly to management challenges when empowered to do so by more egalitarian \u201ccircle of equals\u201d governance practices.
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\nSo then Hettleman lays out his take on the specifics of the problem…<\/p>\n

Teachers aren\u2019t given strong support in their daily classroom activities: when core curricula are not carefully selected; when training for teachers in implementation of the curricula, including sequence and pacing of lesson plans, is neglected; when tools for gathering and analyzing student data are not provided; when there is not a proper alignment between what is to be taught and the capacity of teachers (for example, the instructional time allotted and the class size) to address the continuum of fast to slow and struggling students; and when there is insufficient supervision, monitoring, and feedback loops.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(That is quite a sentence, brazenly longer and with more clauses than even I would fling onto the printed page!) I do agree with his first point that teachers need more external support in their work with students. But some of the forms of support that he calls out are more in line with the hierarchical \u201ccommand and control\u201d model of governance where teachers need to be instructed by their management \u201csuperiors\u201d on the proper way to deliver a standardized curriculum. This rather than creating more of a \u201ccircle of equals\u201d governance process, leveraging what he cites as teachers\u2019 proclivity to be \u201cinformal and collegial, rather than formal and hierarchical\u201d.
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\nHettleman states that the key to reform is better focus on the \u201cdaily interactions between teachers and students\u201d, which he feels is the hardest change to achieve. His recipes for that change features a move away from traditional educational management by school \u201csuperintendants\u201d toward school \u201cCEOs\u201d who will act more on the contemporary entrepreneurial business model. This new approach includes contracting with and outsourcing to \u201ccharter-management organizations\u201d to run individual schools, and \u201cnonprofit corporations such as Teach for America and New Leaders for New Schools, which recruit and train nontraditional teachers and principals\u201d.
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\nHe admits that these unorthodox approaches have had mixed results so far, but he firmly believes that moving towards more \u201cprofessional\u201d management practices is the path forward to more successful schools…<\/p>\n

Still, management reforms must find their way onto the public radar and into classroom teaching and learning. Even the best and brightest teachers must get more support than they now get. It\u2019s the classroom, stupid. The future of school reform won\u2019t succeed otherwise.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t see it quite that way. In my thinking, \u201cIt\u2019s the governance, stupid\u201d, that will transform schools, rather than this endless and perpetual tinkering of reform. Flatten the org chart and empower teachers to work more collegially and collaboratively as a circle of equals (and even, heaven forbid, include students) with a key role in school decision-making rather than just taking orders from above.
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\nLet\u2019s not continue to give governance short shrift. The business world (at least in my 23 years of experience in perhaps more enlightened corporate work environments) has gone a long way towards \u201cflattening the org chart\u201d and empowering individual workers to become full stakeholders, including \u201cstopping the assembly-line\u201d when they think something is not right. This is all part of our culture\u2019s historic transition from patriarchy to partnership, from hierarchies of command and control to facilitative management empowering circles of equals.
\nTags: school reform, school transformation, classroom reform, school governance, educational governance, governance transformation, circle of equals, patriarchy to partnership, hierarchy of control, command and control<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Education Week March 19 article, \u201cIt’s the Classroom, Stupid: School Reform Where It Counts the Most\u201d, author Kalman R. Hettleman is at least attempting to address the issue of governance that I highlighted in my piece yesterday on \u201cDefining Governance\u201d. Hettleman says… The mismanagement of classroom instruction is the ugly secret and fatal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[484,732,735,728,733,734,722,580,730,731],"class_list":["post-1874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-ongoing-strategy-for-learning","tag-circle-of-equals","tag-classroom-reform","tag-command-and-control","tag-educational-governance","tag-governance-transformation","tag-hierarchy-of-control","tag-patriarchy-to-partnership","tag-school-governance","tag-school-reform","tag-school-transformation"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t