A recent article in the Los Angeles Times reported that two administrators - one a high school principal, the other "his boss" (a local superintendent) - have gone back to the classroom. It is so unusual for an administrator to teach a class that their action called for a feature article in the newspaper.
Naturally, I was ready to cheer; teachers are made aware constantly that the conditions under which they work are managed by people who have little experience in the classroom, and that little was long ago. "If they only had to fill my shoes for a while, then maybe they'd understand …" is a common thought. So hooray, two men were actually doing it.
Then I got beyond the headlines. Each man is teaching a single class, and for only two days a week. Their teacher "partners" who teach the class the other three days a week actually stay in the room with the administrators; the regular teacher is there to "take attendance, answer phones, and deal with interruptions." And these administrators are not teaching incognito; their status is known to their students, who - unless they are from another planet (and they most decidedly are not - one is a "regular" class, the other an honors class) - will not be eager to get into trouble with the boss of their institutions.
End of hooray.
Do these happy bureaucrats think they are duplicating a genuine teaching experience? They can't be that dumb. But they can use the experience to claim that they know and understand teachers and the classroom. And, oh yes, incidentally of course, they will still be getting their administrative salaries while they're playing teacher. Apparently, no one suggested they experience life on teacher pay.
Yes, I am angry. We're dealing, all the time, with an upside-down pyramid of pay and prestige and power. Anyone who has thought about education at all must know that kids are taught and learn in the classroom, under the guidance of a teacher. That's the whole point of the thing, and that's what the whole education system is about: kids in the classroom with a teacher.
Everything else is auxiliary. Everything. We have custodians to keep the school premises usable. We have secretaries and clerks of every description to handle the red tape of running any kind of institution. We have specialists like psychologists and nurses to field the problems that prevent kids from learning in a classroom. And we have administrators whose job is to make sure the whole thing runs smoothly, to deal with the public and the lawmakers who provide the budget, to back up the authority of the teachers. Helpers, all of them; that's what auxiliary means. We need them, but keep the picture clear: without us, they wouldn't exist.
Given those plain facts, wouldn't it make sense to pay the top salaries available to the people who do the actual educating? And yet the opposite is true: the auxiliaries with the managerial positions get the top salaries, and the farther away they are from the classrooms they supposedly aid, the higher their salaries.
Look at some of the figures. To begin with, we have in California a better ratio of administrators to teachers than we do of teachers to students. There are 12,536 school site administrators, 2,447 central office administrators, and 6,088 coordinators and supervisors. My calculator tells me that works out to one administrator for every 13.9 teachers, counselors and librarians. Are we harder to manage than kids are to teach? If not, why so many at management level, the most expensive in the system?
Moreover, those 21,071 administrators have 52,543 administrative support staff; that's 2.49 staff persons per administrator. How would you like that much help in dealing with attendance, filling out rollbooks, grading papers, planning lessons and handling all the other "interruptions" that those "teaching" administrators disdained doing?
People need machines in this world, so in the Central Valley school district of Los Banos, for example, the central office, where 17 people spend their work days, has four Xerox machines, and enough paper to keep them functional. But over at the middle school, 41 teachers get to share one whole machine. At the high school, the figure is worse: 81 teachers, one Xerox.
That's just one case; you can do the count at your school, and it will probably be similar. The problem is not a fundamental lack of money in California either. Our state has the fifth largest economy in the world; we overtook France this year and are pushing Great Britain; that's rich, any way you define the word. It would take a funding increase of $5.5 billion to get us up to the middle - not the top - among the states' spending on their schools.
NEA figures show that California's spending averaged $7,607 per student in 1999-2000, compared to New York's $11,852, Connecticut's $11,569 and New Jersey's $10,941.
That's bad enough, but the spin-off of insufficient funds has pushed us to 49th in class size among the 50 states. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the student-teacher ratio in California is 21 students per teacher while the national average is 16.1. (Wouldn't you love to have classes of only 21 students?) Top of the pile is Vermont, with 12.3 to 1, followed by Massachusetts at 12.5 to 1. It can be done, no matter how crazy the way of computing.
Again, that's bad enough. But auxiliary personnel who really do give direct support and help for classroom teachers are becoming so scarce we'll have to put them in museums pretty soon. For 6.4 million kids, for example, we have only 6,074 counselors. And in the midst of a public outcry on the subject of getting kids up to par in reading, we have only 1,379 librarians in the entire state. Can you believe that? I don't even want to find out how many actual libraries we have in our schools, or how many books there are in them.
Perhaps the most amazing figures of all, though, have to do with the results that we teachers get, despite the way we're treated. Aside from just hanging in there, coming to work every day to meet our classes of 35 and more kids, struggling to find textbooks that are halfway usable and up-to-date, fighting for a living - never mind professional - salary, and managing to stay on the good side of the many little Caesars who inhabit principals' offices, we somehow turn out graduates by the drove: 88.1 percent of our kids graduate from high school, making us number two in the world. And we fire them up enough so that 62.9 percent of those graduates go to college, which puts us number one in the world. Thirty-three percent of those young men and women actually graduate from college, again putting us at the top of the heap. Think what we could do if teaching conditions were right! California teachers do impossible deeds daily, against all odds. That's why I say teachers are heroes.
I have news for those "teaching" administrators and all their buddies. You may find yourself doing it full time some day, because we are determined to turn the pyramid back right-side up.
Make no mistake about it. We are going to change the outrageous conditions under which California teachers labor, we are going to make our state number one - in classroom statistics.
