Erica’s original writing can be found at:
http://ericaphotiades.edublogs.org/2006/02/23/
personal-reading-teachers-and-administrators-2/
This weekend I had the chance to read Erica’s response to an article about a substitute teacher who committed suicide after being manipulated and falsely accused by administrators. While I think that administrators are generally wonderful people who are giving their all to help students, I am glad that Erica brought this article to my attention because I know that there are some administrators who really are abusive of their power. While teacher-administrator relationships have, as yet, not been discussed in any of my TE classes, I don’t think it is too early to start thinking about how we will interact with the other staff members of the schools we work in, especially administrators. Those who are in direct responsibility for running schools are influenced by many factors- the parents, the school board, the community, and the other staff members, to name a few- and all of these will affect how they use the power they have to run their schools. As teachers, our job will not consist only of managing our classrooms but also learning how all of these factors will cause the administration to act and how their actions will affect our classrooms.
During my experiences I have never heard of anything as drastic as administrators using blackmail to get teachers to comply with their opinions, but I think that all teachers know that there are boundaries created by the attitude and opinions of administrators that form barriers to certain kinds of actions. In my life, I have seen this subtler power play grow into open favoritism of some staff members over others, made obvious by ready ability to comply with the requests of those staff members. While I don’t by any means think that what I have observed translates into automatic reason to suspect administrators, my point is that we should generally be aware of the politics of education at the classroom, staff lounge, and main office level. Hopefully, as Erica states, we will all be in positions where we can talk openly with administrators about problems we have out of our concern for our students. If this can’t happen, I think the resulting problems could be even more stressful for a teacher than the difficult situations that sometimes happen in the classroom.
As an additional thought, sometimes I have seen teachers become the most frustrated by a lack of action or the failure of administrators to use their power to change something when it would have been appropriate. There are situations when administrators should act to change a procedure that is not functioning well in the school or a problem that occurs repeatedly in a classroom, and they do not take the initiative to do so. It is these times that I think would be especially hard for teachers as well, since we may feel that we have to have a solution to a problem before we have the right to discuss what we think is wrong. However, if the open dialogue is there, teachers can work with administrators to the benefit of the students.
