Mistrust

Had a department meeting this afternoon, and I'm left with something simmering that just doesn't feel quite right.

Why is it that we teachers walk around with a default mistrust of the administration at both the building and district level? Much of the meeting today--though the laughing felt positively cathartic here in the last few days before spring break--consisted of basically bashing the administration. So our district literacy coordinator wants to come meet with the department--why did we laugh about that for what seemed to be a good five minutes?

I suppose that in difficult times, like when districts across the country are faced with impending budget cuts that essentially lead to Sophie's choices (cut teachers or cut programs or which totally necessary program can we get rid of?), it's difficult for teachers to maintain trust in the people who are making big decisions that may affect our lives drastically. We are afraid that the worst might happen. It's far easier to direct anger and mistrust at our administrators than to trust that they are operating on the best intentions but are often put in impossible situations where there's no way they could make decisions that would keep everyone happy.

The truth is that even in the best of times without impending budget cuts in the schools where I've worked, the implicit mistrust of the administration from the perspective of the teachers is palpable. And I've never totally understood it. It think we can all do a better job of trying to understand the full complexities of the situations that challenge our schools rather than vilifying the administrators who have to make the tough decisions in the face of those complex and often impossible situations.

These are the reasons why I myself never want to be an administrator. Well, that and the fact that I know that I feel most relevant with both feet firmly rooted in the classroom.

Seems like I should say something here about teachers' unions. Oh my. I have always been a member of my local teachers' union, but I've always had very mixed feelings about it. The worst I've seen of teachers' unions perpetuates an us-vs-them mentality of total and complete mistrust of the administration. The worst I've seen of teachers' unions protects ineffective teachers. The pictures my teachers' unions have painted of my schools' administrations have often contradicted my own experiences with my administrators, which have been largely positive through the years.

But on the other hand, we teachers are often asked to do more and more, with less time and no additional money--and unions have achieved fairer treatment in school districts for many teachers through the years. I see clearly why they are there--so despite my concerns with teachers' unions based upon my experiences with them, I will always belong. They play an important role in a system that is essentially a clusterf$@&.

What I mean by that is that the American Educational system is too big, too entrenched in persistent ideas about what it means to do school, too underfunded (I could go on...). It's a mess. Sometimes I feel so frustrated by the enormity of the problems in our system that it seems that nothing besides striking the entire system down and building it up again will ever be able to achieve real, meaningful change for our students.

But then I remember why I do what I do. I know that in my own circle of influence, I can make a difference. I can attempt to make school meaningful for my students. I can try to effect change in my school. I can find like-minded teachers who will sit with me in our tiny offices as we lunch on the leftovers we've brought from home and imagine our ideal visions of our classrooms and schools and actually talk about how we can move toward those visions. I can find school leaders I can trust and believe in to help us enact our visions.

And the thing is that I know those school leaders are out there in the ranks of our administrators, but if the default view of the administration is that it is always up to something nefarious and selfish, how will we ever get anywhere toward real and meaningful change? We teachers enact this view of the administration in the way we talk about our administrators when we are beyond earshot of them.

Our words represent what we think. In the words of one of my trusted school administrators, words are things. The words we use ultimately define the things in our lives. We can choose to keep talking about our school leadership with the negative words we often use by default, or we can seek to better understand the complexities that confront our schools and aim to first have a good-faith belief that our administrators are acting on what is best for our students until given some concrete reason not to trust the leadership.

Enough for now.
Signing off
M. Shelley