(Editor's note: Patch columnist Jerry Heverly is an English teacher at San Leandro High.)
One of the hardest things for me to understand about working in a high school is our unusual organizational structure.
I’m a strong advocate for teacher autonomy. I think my students benefit when I determine what they will be exposed to. I gripe constantly about state (and soon, federal) lists of ‘standards’.
I do understand, though, when people point out that it’s difficult to fire me and that standards at least offer the taxpayers a modicum of control over what I do.
But if you were to look at the organizational chart of a high school you would see, I think, that even state oversight does not assure that I am properly supervised.
At the top of our organization is, of course, our principal. Under her she has five lieutenants called assistant principals (APs).
But these administrators have little to do with me.
Two APs deal almost exclusively with discipline.
They spend their day sitting in an office listening to a steady stream of kids who have been referred for a variety of infractions. They deal out consequences and generally try to help the teachers maintain a peaceful environment on campus.
One AP is the principal of the ninth grade building.
The other two APs have a variety of administrative duties including our after school program and issues of compliance with various government mandates.
None of these folks could be said to supervise teachers.
Below the APs are about a dozen department heads: English, Career Technology, Art, et. al. But the name is somewhat of a misnomer, if you think of a department head as someone who directs underlings. The only structured interaction between a department head and the teachers under her or him is a monthly meeting after school.
Department heads do not observe other teachers, they don’t have any role in hiring teachers, they don’t evaluate teachers, they can’t discipline teachers, they don’t have any role in determining a teacher’s salary, they don’t decide a teacher’s schedule, they don’t determine what a teacher does in any way. Mostly they get information from the principal and pass it along to members at the monthly meeting.
{When I was English department head I argued that I was just a messenger boy but the AP who was the nominal overseer of the department insisted I should be a leader. I claimed I had no power. He said I did, but wasn’t using it. It was power to do the inconsequential, I thought. }
We don’t have an organizational flow chart but, if we did, it would have a principal on top, five AP’s below, and 120 teachers on the bottom rung. That’s 120 highly educated/opinionated adults “supervised” by five AP’s who seldom witness any actual teaching.
The result of this system is that teachers occupy their own fiefdoms. I can close the door to my classroom and operate for 180 days out of view of any authority. I have state mandated lists of topics I must teach but I teach them as I see fit. I make no reports to my AP supervisors. I’m salaried so I don’t punch a time clock.
If I didn’t need to check my mailbox I could probably stay out of view of the school principal for 99% of the school year. (We do have monthly staff meetings.)
At this point you could reasonably call me nuts for complaining about a lack of teacher autonomy, but I do.
Next week I’d like to tell you about the one instance where I’m observed and evaluated by my boss.
This column is written by San Leandro High School English teacher Jerry Heverly. Its tag line is inspired by education blogger Joe Bower who says that when his students do an experiment, learning is the priority. Getting the correct answer is entirely secondary. You can read more essays like this in the archives of Entirely Secondary.)
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