Over Your Shoulder/In Your Hair/At Your Throat/Under Your Skin
By

Ron Isaac


Supervisors can be humps in any business. That convenient truism has entertained disgruntled workers since the Egyptian pyramids were built. Groaning and passing the buck can be a fair and amusing tactic to elude personal responsibility and there's a time and place for everything. We're only human.

But New York City's Department of Education is unique, because whether its supervisors have harsh or mild temperaments, none has been held back for failure to possess an inkling of knowledge about the specialized area of his supervision. Subordinates typically have far greater training and experience than their superiors.

Anecdotal evidence, no matter how overwhelming, can always be contradicted and credibly challenged by diligent opportunists, planted in key places, who will dig up and plug fake research or bribed testimony to abet the perception that the nearly unanimous point of view of teachers is actually isolated and idiosyncratic. Chancellor Klein has many impressive job titles available for such mercenaries whose honor is on the market for the highest bidder.

Knowledge must be power because the judgment of many supervisors is lame. Klein's new breed of assistant principal is often in charge of subject areas of which they are totally ignorant. They rate the job performance of teachers who after decades of training and experience have developed expertise in those same areas.

In one ordinary case, the assistant principal took over the music department. He unflinchingly admitted that he couldn't tell Beethoven from beets, notes from nuptials, or cellos from cellophane. The school orchestra had made brilliant progress under the leadership of their teacher. His marvelous skills as an educator complemented his resume', which included his having studied music for thirty years, been a composer contracted to a major publisher, and a regular performer at Lincoln Center. Still, the assistant principal ruled him an "unsatisfactory" teacher.

Because of this, the teacher's salary was frozen, he became ineligible to teach special after-school programs, and he was on track for eventual dismissal. Later it was alleged that there was a "hit" on him. His earlier refusal to accept a transfer was an obstacle to the placement in his position of an aspiring teacher who reportedly was close to a local educational bureaucrat. No matter. The assistant principal became a principal soon after.

The teacher resigned in disgust. The children lost.

In the same school the prestigious post of science department head defaulted to a different assistant principal who didn't know biology from black magic, chemistry from clairvoyance, or geology from gee-whiz. The teacher was an idealist with an engineering degree. After having worked for twenty years for a Department of Defense contractor, he was a natural in the classroom, merging proficiency with evangelical zeal. His supervisor couldn't pass a test that his seventh grade students had aced, but he had to humor her whose observations were mere stabs in the dark.

The social studies supervisor, to her infinite credit, was a bit coy about flaunting her no-nothingness, although she dutifully ticked off some critical comments in the one-size-fits all checklist used for formal lesson reviews. She had been a teacher for only two years and was blind to history, geography, and economics, but she was ambitious and knew how to network. All who traced her career attributed its advancement to fixings unrelated to the kind of merit most of us used to take for granted.

One of the English teachers, author of monographs on Milton and Carlyle, was under the thumb of the principal himself, who couldn't write a coherent letter to his Parent Association without the intercession of that virtual angel called "Spell Check."

In fourteen hundred public schools in New York City, this is the norm. Flying high as a supervisor is an almost overnight affair even before one has earned one's wings in the classroom. It used to take twelve years or more; now it is commonly achieved in two.

To escape the rigors of the classroom and to leap tens of thousands of dollars of salary in a single bound, new teachers jump onto the supervisory runway as soon as possible.

Competent and credible supervision is vital. Supervisors should be appointed only after they have passed muster in the classroom and are experts in the subjects of their responsibility. They should have competed successfully in an open process in which backgrounds are screened and unrigged interviews held with administrators, teachers, and parents, as was standard before Klein replaced appointments with anointments.

Teachers should do their best work under all circumstances whether under their control or prescribed for them. But in education as in the military or corporate world, there will be greater productivity and loyalty from a workforce that looks up to its leadership than one that is forcibly reminded at every turn of its inadequacies. Teachers and supervisors should belong to the same united federation of servants to children.