Pretense, Public Relations, and Power

"They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel."
~ Carl W. Buechner

The following pretenses occur regularly in our schools:


• Principals learning every students' name to impress parents that they are concerned about their welfare, while regularly abusing the teachers that parents want in their school and setting policy detrimental to children.



• Principals with open door policies always there for parents, but never doing anything but what advances their own self-serving political agenda.



• Principals holding special birthday lunches with children so they can pump information from them to use against their teachers.



• Meetings stating collaborative decision making, when principal's body language produced the decision she wanted, putting teachers in state of fear



• Teachers called in after stating an opinion at a meeting about any issue that was not acceptable to the superintendent. "We do not like dissenters. It is not the [School District's} way."



• Don't you know about public relations? Parents do not want to hear you don't have time to do something.



• Teachers told by administrators that they didn't want to hear that "We the people," crap.



• Supervisor writing "Home of the Idealist" on Settlegoode's personnel file, while pretending she operated with ideals regarding children.



• Parents who complained, put on committees to keep them occupied and make them think they were being listened to.



• Principal wearing "For Your Children" pin and using that phrase in her/his letter writing.



• Schools using the Character Counts program, reading advice about proper moral behavior such as why it is wrong to lie, while doing the opposite



• Behavior modification programs put into effect whereby classes would win a prize for lining up properly. The principal would choose the winners based on the teachers who were her friends, ignoring improper behavior from their class, while not giving credit to good behavior from targeted teachers' classes, upsetting the children with this unfair behavior.



• Principals awarding Golden Apple awards, or other awards to teachers because the parents or students nominated them, and then harassing and ridiculing the same teacher.



• Celebrating Teacher Appreciation week, and pretending teachers were appreciated.



• Yearly "heartfelt" appreciation messages from the school board at Christmas time, while teachers were being abused regularly.



• Principals using smiley face signatures on memos to teachers as if they were their pals, loosening their defenses so they will talk about colleagues and give the principal ammunition without knowing they are ratting on their friends.



• Districts receiving awards while they were torturing teachers and violating laws and right of children. Districts using the insignia of an award on their stationery for thirteen years after the award was won.



• Principals implementing programs because of their visual effect, ignoring the merits of that program or how it interfered with the curriculum that needed to be taught.



• Principals implementing programs to make their friends look good regardless of the merits of the program and pretending they are valuable when they are a waste of time.



• Attending programs to pretend they are into reform, while behaving in total contradiction with the program.

One year, the administration at Avoca School District #37, Wilmette, Illinois, decided to participate in the Quality School program. For the opening Institute day, the educator running this Quality School program informed the entire staff about this program in which the district was committed to participate. A series of classes were taught to administrators through Northwestern University and several of them attended these classes each weekend for quite a while. The principal handed out literature and suggested reading material. Horwitz actually read one of the books by William Glasser, since she took her job seriously. She found the book to be quite interesting. It was an organization model based on Deming who had worked with Japanese industry after the war and had great success using this model that was based on the value of every individual in the organization. The belief was that even the lowest person on the totem pole could have information that would enhance the goal of the outfit, or to provide customer service.

Upon reading the book, Horwitz realized that there was no possible way they could implement this program with the regime of terror in place, and wondered why they were spending so much money to send these administrators to learn the program. Given that the book focused on customer service, or meeting the parents needs, there was no way that this school could flip from sabotaging parents and using teachers as a buffer, forcing them to lie and manipulate the parent, to actually caring about parents and children. At a staff meeting, the principal announced they were going to begin integrating aspects of the program. Horwitz raised her hand asking how they were going to implement a program that empowered all the staff to have a voice, when the model currently in place was so top down. She was written up for saying this and accused of being rude, another term for critical thinking. And then not another word was heard about it. It was never implemented in spite of all of the time and expense put into it. One could speculate that they had intended to pretend to implement, and never anticipated any teacher actually reading about it. Knowing Horwitz now understood the program, they could not pass out buttons, and play games and go through the motion of pretending to want reform without scrutiny. Obviously, this is why teachers with integrity and dedication to doing what is right were a thorn in the side of phonies who only wanted to pretend they cared about what they were doing for children. Honest people might call them on something not realizing the game going on.

Hazard, the educational expert paid to say what the administrations wanted to hear, gave his testimony about the Quality Schools program at Horwitz's dismissal hearing:

#2189

Q Are you familiar with what's called the quality school model?

A I think I know what it's about.

Q Is that a good model?

A I don't know.

Q Do you have any opinion about that?

A Some people like it, some don't think much of it. I've being around this business long enough to know don't get too enamored with this or that fad, let it rest for a while and see if it survives.

Q Has this quality school model survived?

A I don't think so. I think it's been identified with the guru that formed it.

Q Who was that?

A I don't know, there is a name that's attached to it. I think it's a professor somewhere that decided to set up a new term called quality schools and he tried to invent something that was already in place and that is the notion of quality in education. By calling it quality I guess that differentiates it from the inferentially unquality school programs in other places. I don't inhale too deeply on that nonsense.

Note that Hazard called this program nonsense. There is a pattern of the swinging pendulum so prominent in education. A new theory evolves, and everyone jumps on the bandwagon. Hazard seems to describe this program as one of those foolish types, indicating that quality schools were already in place. One has to wonder, what were the financial or political benefits of sending a staff to a program such as this, since it obviously wasn't to implement it. Perhaps it was just a front for pretending to care about education, so they could defend themselves against parental accusations of stagnancy of reform. Or maybe there was something in it for someone. It had to have been costly to enroll several people for several months at Northwestern University. The public will never know anything that the districts need to keep secret. The system is well insulated with silent teachers who don't talk about all the time invested in nothing. At the least, this was a comedy of errors whereby an entire district jumped on a bandwagon for a program with no clue as to what it was, and when Horwitz made it apparent to them what it really was, they realized they needed to disband it. Perhaps on the weekends when they attended the classes, they were not listening, or they might have known it was a big mistake right off the bat. Or maybe the concepts were too intellectual for them to grasp. Whatever, it was another example of the pretense that saturates our public schools.

• National Louis University starting a doctoral program in social inquiry and education reform, then turning down a candidate because she was too into reform - a program that was a sham devised to make them appear to care about reform.



• Public officials talking about a serious teacher shortage ignoring, communications about how excellent teachers are being abused and disposed of by our schools, and doing nothing to intervene to at least see that these excellent teachers are placed elsewhere rather than discarded.
• The entire system, from the district through the state, pretending to care about teachers while they sell them down the river.

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