Yes, that's right. The school janitor was chosen as "Educator of the Year". I s**t you not. Of course, considering the competition, he no doubt earned it.
Posted on 02/13/2004 7:52:42 AM PST by happykidjill
Some of us have no contact with students whatsoever, and create reams of paperwork which apply to children whom we’ve never met. I, on the other hand, am one of the lucky ones who gets to interact with pupils directly for assessments, observations, or group therapy.
It is my role to academically assess, on an annual basis, all of the children at our alternative school. This is due to our kids being exempted from district wide testing based on what I call “The Spicoli Effect.” This refers to their habit of drawing rocket ships on evaluation protocols if left unsupervised in auditoriums.
One-on-one sessions with students are the most rewarding aspects of my vocation. On one occasion, last October, while timing a student completing mathematics problems, the young man suddenly threw his pencil down and rose from his chair, in response to an “all call” from the PA. He walked towards the door after announcing, “I’m going to the tug-o-war.”
I told him to wait a minute. I called up front, and discovered that the whole school, in the midst of academic instruction, was being summoned for festivities in the gym.
What occasion were we celebrating on that day in October? The fall harvest? No, it was yet another in a long line of contrived events, and this one happened to be titled “Wacky Wednesdays.” Bizarre holidays from curriculum have become the rule rather than the exception since our school hired a new principal in 2001.
Old-timers like myself dubbed her “Princess Sparkle.” It is a most appropriate nickname for our leader as it surgically captures her vapidity, lust for attention, lack of seriousness, and ever-present sense of entitlement. No one has ever witnessed her read a book or keep her mouth shut for more than two minutes.
Her leadership style is to micromanage, but, as we have painfully discovered, micromanagement without knowing what others are supposed to be doing equates with chaos. An example of this would be her habit of picking out curricular resources for the building.
Unlike other principals, she has no erudition in which to guide her in the selection of instructional materials. Therefore, she delegated the task to me. She asked me to study thousands of dollars worth of biology sample textbooks to determine which one would suit our pupils best. After three days of examination, I made a recommendation and she disregarded it in favor of the most expensive option.
However, like any good bureaucrat, I learned to put up with her eccentricities and endless discussions for the first two years of her tenure, but it took a Herculean effort of self-control which could barely be maintained by her third year with us.
Her qualifications for the job seemed to be an intense love of conversation, and that was just about it. I have no doubt that her tombstone will one day read: “shallow brooks run noisily.”
Predictably, the eternal prattle was the largest barrier to her leading others. Her sentences are so impressionistic and lacking in detail that one never knows where the chatter ends and the directives begin. Many orders are cloaked as suggestions and many suggestions are merely repetitions of things others have said with which she does not agree. If an impartial observer were to record her conversation for an hour they would discover that the words they took down formed not sentences but a hyper-verbal figure-eight.
We often refer to her as “Play Therapist in Chief” as it seems that she has no stomach for the three r’s or even the seldom stated forth r, which is known in traditional circles as “responsibility.” Indeed, if our students followed her priorities in life, the only job they’d be qualified to work would be as the principal of a highly wayward alternative school.
However, back in October when the student threw down his pencil, I had a radical, non-bureaucratic impulse. I thought, “Surely this must stop.” I knew that complaining to Sparkle would be pointless. Any complaints to her would merely make me one of her targets as she is incapable of accepting criticism and, besides, there was no way she’d ever consider ending her personal crusade to turn our building into a 80,000 square foot Nintendo game.
After walking the student down to the gymnasium, I decided to avoid the mass distractions and stroll over to the area supervisor whose office is located on the other side of our compound.
When I got there he said he was busy but charitably gave me a few minutes of his time. Reluctantly at first, I began detailing the lack of pedagogical commitment on the part of our principal and the way in which our enrollees were being robbed of a free appropriate pubic education (FAPE in special ed terminology). He listened thoughtfully and when I was finished said, “Well maybe she needs to hear some of this from you. I’ll call her over and we can have a meeting.”
I figured that he wanted to use me as a way in which to deliver his own censure of Sparkle the Entertainer–which was perfectly acceptable. We scheduled a meeting date and, in the days leading up to it, the happy princess refused to look in my direction or talk to me; so my request had already yielded dividends. Two veteran teachers, upon hearing about the meeting, asked if they could attend as backup. I agreed and the three of us were off.
We exchanged greetings and then everyone sat down. The supervisor related factually our earlier conversation and asked me to elaborate. I began slowly and pointed out that our students are only schooled from 8 am to 2 pm everyday and that those six hours already included breaks, lunch, gym, and movies on Friday afternoons [in fact, one teacher I know refers to another’s classroom as “the Cineplex” because his VHS player is rarely off].
I stressed that there was altogether too much “play” and not enough “work” at our facility. I reasoned that these children had more play in their lives than any of those present had ever experienced (other than Sparkle) over the course of the last thirty years.
The majority of our pupils are the offspring of permissive single parents who dress them in the finest gansta wear and rarely monitor their neighborhood activities. Most college sophomores would be envious of the level of partying even our fourteen-year-olds engage in.
The students are predominantly male and, without discussing feminine psychology at great length, you can imagine the amount of attention they receive from girls in the community. Over the six years that I have worked there, I never heard a single young man say that he had only one girlfriend; they usually have scores. Announcements of monogamy are entirely absent from their speech. Home is one big MTV video. Their schooling should not be a continuation of the party. That is why I concluded my argumentation with the statement, “School should be a sober place but ours is not.”
Then the meeting took an Orwellian turn. I was conscious of the fact that during my presentation of deficiencies, the supervisor barely listened. Upon arrival, I expected a fair hearing. It turned out that what I anticipated to be a discussion was, in his mind, an opportunity to jerk me back into line. Improving our educational environment had little to do with why he arranged this gathering.
This was evident the moment after I finished when he began defending Sparkle with the zeal of Mark Geragos. Every point I made he responded to with complete denial. He even informed me that Sparkle was doing an excellent job following his “community model” and that our children needed positive interactions more than they needed books or lectures.
Then, he shared something that I wish was broadcast on every talk radio program in America. The gist of it was that our students never tested well and that assessing their educations was useless because they never improved. It was his belief that, through her de-emphasis of instruction which of course could have been gauged statistically, Sparkle had accomplished great things during her tenure. He claimed that we were building characters as opposed to knowledge bases– even though few believed that our students’ characters markedly improved under our care.
It reminded me of that scene in “My Own Private Idaho” where a house plummets from the sky and crashes into the earth. I could not believe what I was hearing. What he outlined defeated the entire purpose of why taxpayers fund the public schools.
One might be tempted to say that we if changed the characters of disturbed individuals our existence would be worthwhile, but instilling character into forms that have been devoid of it for 15 to 20 years was far from easy. Furthermore, while it is tolerable for day treatment programs at mental health facilities to disregard state educational benchmarks, it is unconscionable that a public school should do so.
If we abandoned the pretense of imparting knowledge, then there would be no way to evaluate the entire venture (analyzing future incarceration rates would not help our cause). Accountability was no longer possible which may have been their goal in the first place.
When he finished speaking it was basically the end of the meeting. There was nothing more to say. All my ideas and initiative evaporated with his responses. This emperor wore clothes and they were funky, pastel and meant more for a disco than our current educational environment.
He acknowledged the problem and deemed it good.
That a district supervisor would confess that we weren’t teaching anybody much of anything was totally unexpected. Of course, when it comes time to plan for the following school year, this same overseer will undoubtedly recommend that our multi-million dollar budget be expanded with whatever cash is available.
Afterwards, the two teachers and I walked back over to the main building. “Wow,” one of them said. “He’s like the Wizard of Oz. They just dropped the curtain and we all got a close-up look at the master doing his work. Who would have thought he’d be more whacked than Sparkle?”
The other said: “Yeah, he’s even worse because he’s smart enough to know better. It’s a big cover-up and always will be. He wants Sparkle to remain in her position so they don’t make him fix things [he used to have her job before he got promoted]. If he keeps lying to the director by saying everything’s fine then he gets to keep his cushy job. I told you not to trust that guy. Watch your back.”
The other one disagreed, “There’s no point. If he watches his back then he’ll just see the bullets hit him. You’re done for, man. It’ll be a death by a million cuts. Having us there was smart. They won’t do anything for a few weeks. Next year, just to torture you, they’ll bring in two more people to do your job and put them in an office with nothing to do except watch you work.”
I found it hard to dispute their gloomy outlooks. The whole adventure was without merit. Our visit accomplished nothing. I got played as if I were one of our student’s Super NES controllers.
The next day Sparkle began her counter-offensive. She knew that we’d tell the tale of what transpired to whoever would listen and wanted to put out some preemptive spin. She distributed an all-staff memo which chaotically addressed a number of phantasmal issues and her own personal fantasies. Between the goofy oversized, childlike font, I discerned a personal declaration of victory.
The last two paragraphs were entirely devoted to me and my “all play/all the time“ critique:
Thank you again for making it possible for our students to participate in high school activities. For many of the students these are the only social activities they have ever been able to be a part of. I plan on staying here until the year 2023–I am going to retire as principal when I am 65 years old. Then I want to come back as a teacher assistant (any takers?)? That way I can still be involved with our school community, but go home early.”
Sparkle isn’t capable of change unless it is for no rational reason. What will follow will be more of the same as the public invests millions in a school that has been deliberately engineered to fail.
I now understand that my place of work is not ruled by the laws of productivity. Its is ruled by the Peter Principle:
“The principle is based on the observation that in such an organization new employees typically start in the lower ranks, but when they prove to be competent in the task to which they are assigned, they get promoted to a higher rank. This process of climbing up the hierarchical ladder can go on indefinitely, until the employee reaches a position where he or she is no longer competent. At that moment the process typically stops, since the established rules of bureaucracies make that it is very difficult to "demote" someone to a lower rank, even if that person would be much better fitted and more happy in that lower position. The net result is that most of the higher levels of a bureaucracy will be filled by incompetent people, who got there because they were quite good at doing a different (and usually, but not always, easier) task than the one they are expected to do.”
Mention me the next time you hear someone say that small budgets are the biggest reason the public schools fail. Inform them that our schools are congealed by bureaucracy and that some of the bureaucrats, whose salaries match many CEOs, do everything in their power to see that the least threatening changes are the ones they implement. Certainly mine is only one example but, taken together, humanity itself is a summation of six billion examples like mine.
Its a useless article with such vague details. Reads more like fiction.
pleasure to meet you. Thanks for reading my piece. I have never had stuff questioned like that piece. I don't know why so many people thought it was untrue. The story is not figurative. The main character is ME, and as I'm still employed, I cannot tell you where I work. Thanks again, Bernard
He is real and I thank him.
You're right. The type of principle he's described is believable but overdone; and Our Hero is too heroic by half.
This is a "divide by four" story -- believe about 25% of it, and see where it takes us. Personally, I couldn't finish it, so I won't bother to comment.
Yes, that's right. The school janitor was chosen as "Educator of the Year". I s**t you not. Of course, considering the competition, he no doubt earned it.
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