—Do your fuckin’ jobs.
—Understand each other’s jobs.
—Keep talking to one another.
—We’ve all got to pull on the fuckin’ rope.
—Fight for your reputation.
—Consistent quality is key to ensuring repeat business.
—You never, ever throw the towel in on service.
—No matter how good the food is, you’ve really got to understand every aspect of your business.
These are the words of Chef Gordon Ramsay on his BBC television show, “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” which presents weekly case studies from which Waldorf schools could learn a lot.
In each episode, Ramsay spends a week with a failing restaurant. He diagnoses the blocks to success, works with owners, staff, and chef to reinvigorate the business, and returns a few weeks later to evaluate the results. These are usually remarkably good.
Ramsay is a famously foul-mouthed, pugnacious, potato-faced perfectionist. The show works because of his passion, energy, expertise, and honesty. It also works because, underneath his brutal exterior, Ramsay cares profoundly about both people and food.
The plot of each episode is the same. A restaurant has lost its direction, passion, pride, and energy. This is generally due to a lack of leadership, a lack of respect and trust among colleagues, a lack of communication, and a lack of clarity regarding roles. These lacks are felt but unaddressed among the human beings in the institution, but they are also apparent in the food, which is poorly cooked, and the menu, which is usually too long and too complex. These lacks are manifest even in the appearance of the kitchen, which is usually filthy, and the restaurant itself, which is usually in need of paint and redecoration. Owners, managers, and chefs hear and register the rare compliments, and don’t hear or rationalize away the more frequent criticisms, direct from customers or implicit in returned food and empty seats. They know they need to change—the business is failing—but are afraid of change, or don’t know what to change, or don’t know how to begin, or, in the most perplexing cases, don’t know when to give up on a failing ideology.
The parts reflect the whole, and Ramsay addresses each part in each episode. There is no top-down reform, from owner to chef to staff; there is also no grassroots activism—patrons simply don’t show up, voting with their pocketbooks and bellies. Ramsay’s reforms attack all aspects of the business simultaneously. Ramsay meets with owners, chefs, and staff, cajoling, threatening, teaching. He is part therapist, part consultant. As wealthy chef-owner of several famous restaurants, Ramsay knows the business and gives simple advice that works. Each episode shows him cooking, painting, observing, rolling up his sleeves wherever necessary to demonstrate change.
Ramsay’s principles can be distilled to these:
· The best measure of success is a restaurant full of satisfied customers.
· Achieve success by offering good food, well cooked and well served, at fair prices (Ramsay almost invariably simplifies the menu and lowers the prices).
· Function as a team.
Owner, chef, manager, and staff must understand and fulfill their roles without overstepping boundaries. Each must treat the others with understanding and respect. (Depending on the person and the restaurant, we see chefs who cannot control or communicate with assistant chefs, owners who cannot help meddling in the kitchen, nervous servers who vacillate between tables and kitchen, not communicating with either, and so on.)
· Respect the customers.
When he is successful in his reforms, which is most of the time, a couple of things stand out:
· The menu is simpler, the food fresher, and prices lower than they had been.
· Employees who appeared at the start to be hopeless, to be begging to be fired, save their jobs and fulfill their roles in the business. Clearly, it is easier to manage the function of someone who knows the business but is underperforming than it is to find someone better. While this may not be Ramsay’s personal view, his show demonstrates that competence is situational and learned. Teach an employee her role, define it clearly, support and respect her in it, and a formerly incompetent person appears almost magically competent.
Other lessons become clear as you watch Ramsay’s show:
· Institutional and cultural change are possible.
· Radical change can occur quickly.
· Simple changes can have large effects.
Time after time, uptight, inefficient, lethargic, unhappy, uncommunicative, incompetent employees in a dirty, ugly restaurant transform themselves into relaxed, efficient, energetic, happy, communicative, competent workers in a clean, attractive restaurant. This is the magic of the show.
The Waldorf Restaurant
The parallels between the restaurant business and Waldorf schools are so clear that they are not even analogies; they are two manifestations of the same phenomenon.
The “owner” is the Board of Trustees. The owner decides what sort of restaurant this is, provides the capital to start and maintain it, and hires the right manager and chef to ensure that it is as good as it can be. The owner should have enough confidence in his or her employees not to meddle in day-to-day affairs and the owner must be willing to invest in the success of the business. (Initially, roles among teachers, board, and parents may overlap; over time, a healthy institution will differentiate appropriate and clearly defined roles for each group.)
The teachers are the kitchen staff, each preparing and presenting his or her portion of the menu as well as possible. When every assistant and sous chef acts like a head chef, however, the dysfunction is immediate and profound. Too many cooks… well, it’s true. When roles are ill-defined, time and energy are wasted, communication suffers, and the menu loses coherence.
The menu is the curriculum, and, more than that, the education as a whole. When everyone understands it, the mission of the restaurant—to deliver this menu as well as possible—is clear.
The “front of the house,” such as the maitre ’d and servers, are the staff of the school, such as the administrator, business manager, admissions director, and development director. They represent the restaurant to the customers, presenting a line of communication (and defense) between the kitchen and the dining room. When they are out of the loop—when they aren’t included in an understanding of the menu and kitchen function, they simply can’t do their jobs.
The parents, as adult proxies for their children and as those who pay the bills, are the customers.
The Missing Chef
But where is the chef? Who created this menu? Who takes responsibility for it? The answer is telling. Rudolf Steiner is the chef, and he died in 1925. I believe this absence is among the greatest obstacles to the success of Waldorf schools. Waldorf schools are like a once-great restaurant that is trying valiantly to maintain its position despite the lack of the creative leadership that it once enjoyed.
How can Waldorf schools address this absence? There is no single right or appropriate model. Democratic or aristocratic, consensus decision-making or mandates, it doesn’t matter. Each school community must solve this conundrum for itself. There are many ways to do this well.
There are several ways to go wrong, too. Slavish adherence to a menu and cooking techniques from 1925 create an anachronism that may succeed as a tourist attraction (Waldorf schools as Colonial Williamsburg) but has lost its vitality. Lack of respect for the chef—lip service, unwillingness to understand and engage with his ideas—will also lead to a restaurant that may succeed for a time, but if it represents itself as a continuation of the old, venerated restaurant will soon be seen to be phony.
Waldorf schools today are not willing to look for a Director (although they could)—the position Steiner held in Stuttgart and the position offered by the Steiner School in New York City in the 1930s to Hermann von Baravalle (he refused). No more headmasters, I’ve been told, although why not is rarely explained. The difficult path forward, if we are not simply to hire someone as chef, however, is to form a committee or a system of committees to negotiate between the original menu and techniques of the master chef and the demands and changes of time and place and technique since then. We can call the committee an executive committee, a Council or College of teachers, it hardly matters.
Imagine, however, a restaurant run by a committee. That’s the challenge that faces Waldorf schools: replacing a chef, a leader in the kitchen, with a group that can work harmoniously to write a clear, coherent menu and deliver delicious, well-prepared, well-served food at a good price.
In a restaurant, if the chef is not performing, the owner can fire him or her. Waldorf teachers too often use ideological excuses to distance the Board from its watchdog role—you aren’t anthroposophists, so you don’t understand; Waldorf schools are supposed to be “faculty run” (they’re not; this is perhaps the most harmful myth regarding Waldorf schools in North America in the 20th century). Without board oversight, a Council or College is asked to hire, support, evaluate and possibly terminate colleagues. These roles contain clear conflicts of interest—mentoring and support should never overlap with evaluation and dismissal—and require equals to assume (temporarily) hierarchical roles that the institution, too often, doesn’t acknowledge. The Board legally empowers one person—a faculty chair, an administrator—or a group—a personnel committee—to serve in this role. If those charged with this responsibility are not doing their job, it is the Board’s right and responsibility to alter the situation. We harm our schools when we pretend this is not so.
Working for Health
Some guidelines for reform or a healthy existence, extensions of Ramsay’s principles, leap to mind:
· Clarify and put in writing roles and processes—job descriptions, committee mandates, governance structure, and decision-making processes. (When in doubt, decide how the institution as a whole will proceed and include all stakeholders in the decision. When in doubt, take a step back; there are few real emergencies.) I have seen too many Waldorf schools, for example, that are simply incapable of drawing a coherent diagram of their own governance structure. Take a simple hypothetical decision—whether or not to fire a particular teacher, for example—and try to determine the precise process, personnel, and communication steps involved in seeing this through. Where does the buck stop? Overlapping circles or diagrams with arrows that ultimately circle back on themselves demonstrate looming dysfunction.
· Empower Board, Administrator, and Council or College to monitor performance—all performance; teachers, staff, administration, and board.
· Support real, documented professional development, especially for new hires.
· Work for clarity of purpose with all employees of the institution. If the person who answers the phone doesn’t represent the school as a whole, the school is losing huge opportunities to advance itself.
· Observe, listen to, and respect the customers, the parents; include them appropriately (but not in decision-making, and don’t lead them to believe they’ll be included). Patrons can request a meal that’s not on the menu in a restaurant, but the restaurant as an institution has to decide whether or not it will provide one, and, if so, how and at what price. And when it communicates its decision, it should do so politely and firmly.
· Put children first.
Schools Are Not Restaurants
Clearly, the complexity, scope, and non-profit status of most Waldorf schools make the parallels between restaurants and schools diverge at some points. A school’s curriculum and methods are far more complex than the wildest menu, and the cost of one year of private education is greater than the most expensive dinner. Parents’ commitments to their children far exceed a restaurant patrons’ commitments to their appetites on any given evening. Also, schools are idealistic—worse, ideological. Also, as non-profit institutions, schools do not measure themselves according to profits and can long ignore the bottom line. A failing restaurant is easy to spot; a failing or dysfunctional school is harder to see. And this makes any acknowledgement of a need for change harder to come by.
Another distinction between the process of reforming a school and the process of rescuing a restaurant is the general absence of a Gordon Ramsay-like figure or outside consultant to effect necessary changes. Schools that can afford them can hire consultants, but good consultants who understand Waldorf education from top to bottom and can offer appropriate guidance while retaining the trust of the institution are vanishingly few. Ramsay spends an intense week at a restaurant, often rewriting the menu himself. Reforming a school takes at least a year, and who besides the teachers can, or should, revise a curriculum?
Some readers may protest that the curriculum and methods are established and merely need to be implemented, but this is not so. Which 7th and 8th grade teachers read Fichte and Schiller with their students, as Steiner recommended? Why are some recommended practices—telling stories that the teacher makes up—virtually ignored while other practices that Steiner never mentioned—circle time—taken as gospel? For curriculum and methods to live, they need to be constantly evaluated and updated and altered to fit.
The standard against which these occur is not the external standard of a consultant, but the internal standard of the relationship of each teacher to Rudolf Steiner himself and to the students in the school. To stand between Steiner, as we may understand him through continual study, and a group of children with whom we live for a period of years is an awesome responsibility. Taking this responsibility seriously is the heart of a school. Working to honor it will grow or reform any Waldorf school.
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