I sometimes am guilty of rambling about how the struggles of education have a lot more to do with poor leaders than they do with poor teachers.  We sometimes scapegoat teachers for the struggles of an education system designed as much to keep costs low as it is to help young people learn.  While it may be true that improvements to the system can at times be undermined by teachers who care more about autonomy than high quality professional practice, I tend to believe that administrators and policymakers hold primary responsibility for the struggles of public education in our country. 

In defense of school administrators, leading and managing a school is very difficult work.  I learned that for myself as the principal of an urban high school.  Yet difficult as it may have been, my time as principal convinced me that our schools can be transformed by increased public investment and strong leadership. 

Perhaps the best way to illustrate my point is to share one of my first challenges as a new principal.  It was not long into my first year as principal that I recognized a small handful of classrooms where the teacher was clearly struggling to be successful.  I began doing what any serious first year principal might do: I told the teachers that their performance needed to improve dramatically or they would be at risk for losing their job.  While I am certain these teachers were angry and perhaps confused by my ultimatum, much to their credit, their immediate response was to ask a simple yet genuine question – “what can I do to get better?” 

That question rang in my ears.  It became clear that while it might be easy for me to diagnose a struggling classroom, articulating a vision for what I expected to see was much more complicated, to say nothing of the challenge of developing systems that would build the capacity of my teachers to meet my expectations.  As an organization we had some tools for teacher evaluation, but they lacked a clear instructional vision, and I was just getting familiar with them.  I could see no short-term solution, and so I tried to provide sufficient observation and coaching for my struggling teachers to have enough evidence to feel justified when it came time to make final staffing decisions.  Some might argue that if students are struggling to learn in a classroom, that is all the justification you need.  In my mind such an approach seems more of an admission that leadership does not have the skills to develop and support novice teachers. 

That experience left me severely disappointed – both with myself and the education system that claims to prepare and develop teachers.  I decided that at the very least, teachers in my school should know what I expect from them, and there should be a system for professional development capable of building their capacity to be successful at meeting those expectations.  As a result, we developed a new teacher development guide to make our shared vision for teaching and learning as clear and explicit as possible.   Of course a training manual can never be completely comprehensive nor could it contain all of the practices of strong teachers.  It could, at least, serve as a point of departure – an outline of the basic skills and standards of professional practice for our school. 

Schools have what I consider to be a moral and professional responsibility to build the capacity of their teachers to impact student learning in powerful ways.  Indeed, if we are to hold teachers accountable for what students learn in a teacher’s classroom, then we as school leaders should be held accountable for what teachers learn in our schools.