Making Silk Purses Out of Sows' Ears

It seems WCSD is putting new principals through some sort of "leadership academy," which reminds me of the "academies" NYC's mayor Mike Bloomberg put his inductees through.

In other words, it's teaching these new principals how to create fear and distrust among teachers while at the same time getting away with murder.

Of course it is some kind of Eli Broad-endorsed nonsense.

All of the "training" in the world isn't going to make a silk purse out of sow's ear principal or other administrator. What the public doesn't know is that principals and higher-up administrators are for the most part failed or burned-out teachers who wanted to get away from the classroom. They don't have and don't demonstrate innate talent for "leadership." Most of them have "talent" for knowing the right people or have been related to somebody in a school district. In times past many principals WERE good or at least tolerable because they had years of apprenticeship as teachers and became principals near the end of their careers. They were near retirement age, not in their twenties or thirties or forties lacking maturity and intelligence. However, all of these principals got out of the system when NCLB put a stranglehold on school districts. What districts are stuck with are the dregs, quite frankly.

I could list the names of principals in WCSD--and there are many--who have no business running a school. Instead, they should be fired, not trained, not reassigned, not promoted, not demoted. This is par for the course nationally. What people need to know is teachers, who are at the bottom of the chain, are held to all kinds of accountability yet get paid nowhere near what they are worth while principals, who make professional salaries, are held to NO standards of accountability whatsoever. No, they aren't held accountable to parents, they aren't held accountable for test scores, nothing, because nothing ever happens to them unless a third party raises a stink to the superintendent personally about sexual misconduct or some other serious offense. And even then, the principal merely gets demoted, not fired.

It's a disgraceful state of affairs, but people have been so conned into believing the problems in schools are with teachers and not with administrators, it's hard to get the truth out.