Empowering Principals; Empowering Principles

Here is a link to an article I just read in Education Week, The Missing Piece in TeacherEvaluation Laws: Empowering Principals. I agree completely with this article. I think that organizational theory points strongly to the notion of managing through rational hierarchies.

Teachers report to principals, principals report to superintendents, and superintendents report to boards of education.  Power to make positive change lies in those lines of authority, not in outside mandates coming from state legislatures. I would suspect that most teachers would agree with Ms. Mead, the author of this article.

Now, here’s the rub. I wonder how many teachers understand that the principles of human behavior and organizations that apply here are universal. They apply to schools. They apply to businesses. And, they apply to the home. So what if we changed the title of this article to:

The Missing Piece in Homework Policy: Empowering Parents.

What do you think? Would teachers rally in droves around this notion and recognize that the evaluation of a child’s homework performance and the decisions that follow poor performance, must belong to the parents just as much as the process of evaluating teachers must also belong to the in-school hierarchy.


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Dr. Kenneth Goldberg, is the author of The Homework Trap: How to Save the Sanity of Parents, Teachers, and Students, published by Wyndmoor Press.