Article Reflections

Dave Jones
3/25/06
Innovations in Education
Dr. Mullins

“New Age Principals”
The critical implication that this article employs as a first principal is that there is a shortage of principals in public schools and that there is no incentive to train highly-qualified principals so that people are ‘scared’ to take the job. But this sells short the ambitions and goals of teachers and others in the education profession; it should not be a foregone conclusion that the natural career path for a classroom educator is to become an administrator. Many are perfectly happy being teachers, and it is fallacious and irresponsible to say that there is a nameless, faceless population of teachers out there who would make superlative administrators but are afraid of the challenge of inadequate preparation. Since there is no real consensus on what administrators need to know before taking the job and most positive qualities of an administrator are more or less inherent in one’s individual characteristics and ambitions, someone who fears the inadequate training is already someone who probably does not deserve to become an administrator. In other words, the problem is not that the training is a hindrance to teachers’ motivation to ‘advance’ through the ranks, which in itself is a misnomer of educational social promotion. The problem, rather, is the more general, macroscopic reality that there will never be adequate funding and personnel qualified to both teach and administrate in every single public school regardless of whether training for both teachers and administrators ever does become ‘adequate’.


“Preparing School Leaders”
Now this is not to say that there are no problems training administrators that cannot be ‘fixed’, but rather that the training for the job is, on the whole, not a significant encouragement or discouragement. The general benefits (decent pay, control, etc.) and heavy responsibilities (long hours, unforeseen crises, etc.) of the job, though far from concrete in the prospective candidate’s mind, are relatively clear before one undergoes the training, whether adequate or not. Positive training will not change the fact that there are only a certain number of people born with the innate characteristics and ambitions necessary to become an administrator, but a positive training program would help hone and fine-tune those skills. And there is something significant to be said for that – my favorite line from this article was the contemptuous mentioning of ‘diploma mills’. I have argued many times before in various forums that the field of education has no business being in the university, but the university’s degree system is at the same time the only means by which we consider someone qualified for a job. To put it frankly, one can put a Ph.D. of education in the same room as a Ph.D. of Classics and watch the hilarity ensue. It seems only natural that in such a system, schools have become little more than diploma mills, not because Americans have decided that we need an easier, more crooked way to get more administrators in the classrooms, but because our society has realized that the standards for education schools really do not matter a whole lot in an academic setting. Therefore, it has become easier and easier to obtain an education degree in the academic setting now that the word is out so to speak. While this article is exactly right to point out that standards and requirements should be much more rigorous than they are at present for administrative degrees, it is also wrong to assume that academia is the place to train administrators. Making administrative degrees more competitive will only produce a smaller pool of similarly untrained administrators – divorcing education degrees in general from the university and labeling education training what it really is, job training, is an even better first step than fixing the broke system we have inherited.