In Praise of Bureaucracy

The Anchorage School District is big. Really big. I taught in a K-8 private school, unaffiliated with any district. My first administrative job was in a five school district and my first principalship was in a six school district. The largest district I’d worked in previously had twelve schools. So here I am in one of the 100 largest school districts in the country. I’ve written previously about the perils of bureaucracy, but today I write in praise of it.

Anchorage has been transitioning to the Danielson Framework over the last two years. There have been innumerable PD opportunities, trainings, and work sessions in order to prepare evaluators to use the Framework for teacher evaluation (and pass the big test). Two years ago in Illinois we were told, “Ok, you all have to go through these online modules, it’ll take about 50 hours, and if you don’t pass the test when you’re done, you can’t evaluate teachers in the fall. Oh yeah, the system won’t be ready until June. Good luck!” At the risk of sounding like a sycophant, I publicly praise the Professional Learning Department every chance I get.

Testing. You’ve got PARCC, we’ve got AMP (Alaska Measures of Progress). In Illinois, you can poke around the website, fumble with the practice tests, and hopefully you have enough bandwidth for PARCC. Here they check every school’s bandwidth and tech capabilities, double and triple check them. Building Test Coordinators have hours of training, online resources, and human supports in order to prepare buildings for testing. It’s amazing.

Finally, as a building principal I always felt I was making educated guesses at budget priorities. In this system, there’s accounting, budgeting, risk management, and a fleet of support personnel helping you get it right. So while the big machine often feels overwhelming, it can also be comforting and supportive. I’ve yet to have a negative interaction with someone at the district level. Keep it up, ASD.

CULTURAL OBSERVATION: Everyone goes to Hawaii! Seriously, back home I can’t think of many people I know that have been to Hawaii, but here, virtually my entire staff has been or is planning on going next Winter Break. If you step back and think about it, it makes sense. It costs a lot of money to travel to the Lower 48 so for a few bucks more, why not the islands? Ohio or Oahu? Yeah, that’s a tough one…

I See Gray People (and not in 50 shades)

I’ve always considered myself to be a reflective person. I reflect on my accomplishments and challenges, strengths and flaws, perspectives and opinions. I’ve come to believe that most other people see the world in black and white; by which I mean one way or the other, this or that, right or wrong, but that I see the world in shades of gray. I see both sides of issues. In self-congratulation I laud myself as a more nuanced thinker than most. I think the President is often criticized for this same character trait. But I digress.

After attending the Alaska Charter School Association soon-to-be annual conference last weekend, I’ve come to apply this nuanced thinking to the idea behind charter schools. While I taught in a private school I’d spent my administrative career, 12 years in all, in public schools. I’d come to regard charter schools as leeches not to put to fine a point on it, siphoning public money for private interests. I believed, as many opponents of the charter movement do, that the money going to charters ought to be invested in the same public schools being cited as the need for charters. Then I went to work in a charter school.

I’ve written plenty about the school itself, but haven’t tackled the issue of it being a charter school. Six months in, I’m starting to see the nuances in the charter/anti-charter debate. We offer a choice. We offer an alternative and a unique philosophy of education that is problematic in the confines of the traditional public school. We’re different. AND, we are, like any public school, held accountable. Our students take the same standardized tests. Our school is evaluated by the state on the same criteria as other public schools. Our teachers are a part of the district teacher’s association with the same collective bargaining agreement.

I see gray, so I’m not prepared to declare charters the be-all. Each charter is very different in terms of philosophy and methodology. This became very clear at the conference with representation by Waldorf, Montessori, RISC, Back to Basics, native, and home school contingents. Within a school itself best practice at a micro level (the student) warrants differentiation. Why not the same at the macro level (the school itself)? We inhabit an era in which education is under more scrutiny than political contributions, dietary regulations, and commerce. Everyone went to school, so everyone’s an expert. I’ve been doing this nearly twenty years and I know enough to know that

Cultural Observation: My very first professor in my educational coursework insisted that we not use the term “kids” when referring to students. She abhorred the word, claiming it only meant baby goats. In a previous job everything my predecessor wrote referred to “pupils,” which I consider part of the eye, not the classroom. Here in Alaska I am dumbfounded by the proliferation of the use of the word “kiddos.” Seriously. At first I thought it was an Anchorage thing but then I heard it all over the conference. I have to be honest, I find it a little childish. Trying not to judge, trying to see gray here, but “kiddos?” It sounds like a snack food with peanuts and edamame.