Heard on NPR (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125304448): “A person's moral judgments can be changed almost instantly by delivering a magnetic pulse to an area of the brain near the right ear, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Disrupting or altering a brain process apparently causes adult moral reasoning—which takes both intention and effect into account in forming moral judgments—to become effectively juvenile, taking into account only effect.
One interpretation of this result? "Moral judgment is just a brain process," says Joshua Greene, psychologist at Harvard University. "That's precisely why it's possible for these researchers to influence it using electromagnetic pulses on the surface of the brain."
Another interpretation might be that this research points to a view that moral judgment involves perception, is linked to our senses; when perception is disrupted, the conclusion—as in an optical illusion, perhaps—is faulty.
On the other hand, "the fact that scientists can adjust morality with a magnet may be disconcerting to people who view morality as a lofty and immutable human trait," Greene says. "If something as complex as morality has a mechanical explanation, it will be hard to argue that people have, or need, a soul."
It's probably correct and healthy not to view morality as lofty and immutable--that sounds like the beginning of fundamentalism. But that hardly leads to the conclusion that it's purely mechanical, which is simply the assertion of speculation as truth. And isn't that... fundamentalism?
How often do we have to repeat “correlation is not causation” before even Harvard psychologists will begin to separate science from opinion and belief?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Great Teaching
Amanda Ripley’s article in The Atlantic (Jan./Feb. 2010) examines data on thousands of teachers from “Teach for America” to shed light on what makes a teacher great (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/01/what-makes-a-great-teacher/7841/). The findings?
1. “First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.”
2. [Great teachers] “were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when [Steven] Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: ‘They’d say, “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.’ Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”
3. Great teachers “avidly recruited students and their families into the process;”
4. Great teachers “maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.” “For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.”
5. Great teachers “planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome;”
6. Great teachers “worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
Some of the findings may appear counterintuitive: “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.” Presented with Farr and Ripley’s list, however, a lot makes sense. Who could really argue?
I don’t want to argue with the value of such a list, but I do want to point to its limits. Isn’t there—shouldn’t there be—a significant difference between helping “a new teacher achieve success” and achieving “greatness” as a teacher? Ripley—and, I assume, the “Teach for America” data—simply don’t make this distinction clear. Are we examining master teachers, or are we finding statistical correlations among practices regarding really good new teachers and other, not-so-good new teachers?
More important is the distinction between a great teacher as found in statistics and an actual teacher facing an actual student. What this research defines as a “great teacher” is one who assists a class in achieving better scores on standardized, grade-level assessments than other, less great teachers do. This is beyond reproach. Although standardized tests are execrable political tools and standards themselves are often very low (in order to allow a significant percentage of students to pass them), who wants a teacher who can’t do a good job of this? But is this measure enough to define greatness?
I had a few great teachers. One was my high school German teacher, Dr. Macht. He was a low-key raconteur, easily distracted. He was a World War II veteran, and chose to study German on the G.I. Bill in order to read Nazi documents in order to understand the atrocities he had witnessed. He had endless interesting stories about the war and his life. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he’d begin, looking out the window. And that was that. No more German grammar or vocabulary for that day. But, in the end, I learned a tremendous amount from him, and received my highest achievement test (now called an SAT II) score in German. My point here is twofold. First, a lot of students didn’t think he was a very good teacher, often for the very reasons I liked and appreciated him. And, second, on the list of six qualities from “Teach for America,” he probably scores well below 50%. He was great for me, not so great for others, and, statistically, maybe not that great.
Another teacher, Mr. Tomlinson, a science and math teacher, was frequently acknowledged to be a great teacher, but I just never found that I learned that much from him. He was likeable and clear, but also slow-paced and methodical. For me, any sense of the value of the study as a whole, how the parts fit together, was largely missing. And yet astronomer and professor William Kaufmann III so loved Mr. Tomlinson that he dedicated his book, Discovering the Universe, a well-known astronomy textbook, to him. Another student, a highly successful lawyer, now retired, credits Mr. Tomlinson with literally saving his life as a teen, giving his life sufficient meaning at a time when he was seriously contemplating suicide. Mr. Tomlinson certainly scores more highly on the “Teach for America” criteria than Dr. Macht would; I’d give him, minimally, a strong 4 out of 6. But, for me, he wasn’t that great.
I have written elsewhere on this blog about a third great teacher, Howard Gruber (see "Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist”). But the man whom I met as a great teacher, toward the very end of his career, endlessly frustrated other students with his repetition and with his (beautifully) open-minded refusal to define things too clearly that he believed should not be defined too clearly. Great for me—top two or three—not so great for some others.
My main point is that, as a student, it simply doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else—or some set of statistical criteria, however accurate and admirable—define a particular teacher as “great.” Malcolm Gladwell, in “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), based on research from the University of Virginia, describes the importance of an emphasis on teaching instead of an emphasis on schools. (“Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”) Amanda Ripley writes about great teachers according to valuable statistical correlations. But we can go further, at least in our imaginations and in our ideals, and picture not some abstract “great teacher,” but the teacher who will be great for us, or great for our children, who will help them set their lives on course, or, sometimes, save them.
1. “First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students.”
2. [Great teachers] “were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when [Steven] Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: ‘They’d say, “You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.” When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.’ Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing.”
3. Great teachers “avidly recruited students and their families into the process;”
4. Great teachers “maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning.” “For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.”
5. Great teachers “planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome;”
6. Great teachers “worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.”
Some of the findings may appear counterintuitive: “Things that you might think would help a new teacher achieve success in a poor school—like prior experience working in a low-income neighborhood—don’t seem to matter. Other things that may sound trifling—like a teacher’s extracurricular accomplishments in college—tend to predict greatness.” Presented with Farr and Ripley’s list, however, a lot makes sense. Who could really argue?
I don’t want to argue with the value of such a list, but I do want to point to its limits. Isn’t there—shouldn’t there be—a significant difference between helping “a new teacher achieve success” and achieving “greatness” as a teacher? Ripley—and, I assume, the “Teach for America” data—simply don’t make this distinction clear. Are we examining master teachers, or are we finding statistical correlations among practices regarding really good new teachers and other, not-so-good new teachers?
More important is the distinction between a great teacher as found in statistics and an actual teacher facing an actual student. What this research defines as a “great teacher” is one who assists a class in achieving better scores on standardized, grade-level assessments than other, less great teachers do. This is beyond reproach. Although standardized tests are execrable political tools and standards themselves are often very low (in order to allow a significant percentage of students to pass them), who wants a teacher who can’t do a good job of this? But is this measure enough to define greatness?
I had a few great teachers. One was my high school German teacher, Dr. Macht. He was a low-key raconteur, easily distracted. He was a World War II veteran, and chose to study German on the G.I. Bill in order to read Nazi documents in order to understand the atrocities he had witnessed. He had endless interesting stories about the war and his life. “Boys, let me tell you a story,” he’d begin, looking out the window. And that was that. No more German grammar or vocabulary for that day. But, in the end, I learned a tremendous amount from him, and received my highest achievement test (now called an SAT II) score in German. My point here is twofold. First, a lot of students didn’t think he was a very good teacher, often for the very reasons I liked and appreciated him. And, second, on the list of six qualities from “Teach for America,” he probably scores well below 50%. He was great for me, not so great for others, and, statistically, maybe not that great.
Another teacher, Mr. Tomlinson, a science and math teacher, was frequently acknowledged to be a great teacher, but I just never found that I learned that much from him. He was likeable and clear, but also slow-paced and methodical. For me, any sense of the value of the study as a whole, how the parts fit together, was largely missing. And yet astronomer and professor William Kaufmann III so loved Mr. Tomlinson that he dedicated his book, Discovering the Universe, a well-known astronomy textbook, to him. Another student, a highly successful lawyer, now retired, credits Mr. Tomlinson with literally saving his life as a teen, giving his life sufficient meaning at a time when he was seriously contemplating suicide. Mr. Tomlinson certainly scores more highly on the “Teach for America” criteria than Dr. Macht would; I’d give him, minimally, a strong 4 out of 6. But, for me, he wasn’t that great.
I have written elsewhere on this blog about a third great teacher, Howard Gruber (see "Howard Gruber, Practical Idealist”). But the man whom I met as a great teacher, toward the very end of his career, endlessly frustrated other students with his repetition and with his (beautifully) open-minded refusal to define things too clearly that he believed should not be defined too clearly. Great for me—top two or three—not so great for some others.
My main point is that, as a student, it simply doesn’t matter whether or not anyone else—or some set of statistical criteria, however accurate and admirable—define a particular teacher as “great.” Malcolm Gladwell, in “Most Likely to Succeed,” (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/15/081215fa_fact_gladwell), based on research from the University of Virginia, describes the importance of an emphasis on teaching instead of an emphasis on schools. (“Your child is actually better off in a ‘bad’ school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.”) Amanda Ripley writes about great teachers according to valuable statistical correlations. But we can go further, at least in our imaginations and in our ideals, and picture not some abstract “great teacher,” but the teacher who will be great for us, or great for our children, who will help them set their lives on course, or, sometimes, save them.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Electrochemical Superstition
No parent would want a teacher to teach a science course using a textbook from, say, 1910.
And, in 2110, no parent will want a teacher to teach science using today’s textbook.
In teaching science, then, to avoid a version of the presentist fallacy, it’s important to retain a sense for what is fact—and how we know it’s a fact—what is supposition or hypothesis, and what is plain unquestioned assumption (which, pejoratively, we may call superstition). And textbooks are generally not good at this; they too often present science not as a creative process, but as a finished product, as dogma.
Here's one example. If I had to vote for the greatest illusion or superstition of our age, I would say it’s the illusion that the brain thinks. (Not that you don't need a brain in order to think, but that you think; the brain is an instrument. And a metaphor.)
Assume everything we know of the brain and neurons and neural activity is true—it isn’t, it can’t be, and there’s a lot we just don’t even pretend we know. Picture a vast network of electrochemical activity among neurons, impulses racing this way and that. Picture it down to the smallest activity of an ion across a membrane. Picture it in its trillion-connection complexity. And realize that, if you want to find, say, a thought or an emotion, there’s no there there.
Eventually, for instance, if only in a thought experiment, we could draw all the connections and interactions in a brain, down to the molecular, atomic, or subatomic level; give us a whiteboard large enough, sufficient time, and any tools we need. (Yes, indeterminacy and entanglement might make our comprehension impossible, but these just substitute scientific magic for the old fashioned kind.)
Let us chart the “action potentials” of neural impulses, and the movement and effects of neurotransmitter fluids. (Did you know that the impulse along an auditory nerve is the same—exactly the same—as the impulse along an optic nerve? Watching the impulse pass, you simply cannot tell if this chemical activity relates to vision or to hearing; the impulse is void of quality. Why do we suppose that following it down the rabbit hole of complexity into which it vanishes will yield insight?) What we won’t find is a single thought, emotion, or memory, although—and even this is supposition—we may find the correlates or material or organizational traces of these. We may well be able to look at a configuration of neurons or molecules or particles—now represented in marker on our whiteboard—and correlate some brain configuration with some emotional state or thought, but it should be clear that the configuration is not and can never be an emotion or a thought or anything else that is fundamental to human experience or value.
(We can successfully perform this same thought experiment, however, with a computer. In the computer, if we know how to read the code, we can discover exactly what’s stored there, what’s calculated there, and so on. That’s because the computer isn’t conscious, isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling, isn’t anything but an apparatus, despite our science fiction fantasies. What’s in the computer is what we put there. The computer’s “activity” may yield startling and counter-intuitive results; it may “solve” problems of complexity beyond that of smart human beings in many lifetimes. But the thinking behind this work doesn’t reside in the machinery. It is available through the ingenuity and creativity of the programmers.
When we say that the brain is a computer—unless we are speaking metaphorically—we are not only making a category error, we have things exactly backward. One aspect or set of aspects of the brain is computer-like, but let’s not forget that minds and brains existed for a long, long time before the computer, and that the computer existed in the work and minds of those, like Charles Pierce and Charles Babbidge, who imagined the computer before the technology existed that could bring it to reality.)
I’m not disputing the association and correlation of brain activity with thinking, perceiving, emoting, breathing, heart-beating, or running. You need a brain to do brain-associated things. A pianist needs a piano, and preferably a well-functioning one. But when we say, for example, that “the brain thinks,” we indulge a supposition that not only has not been demonstrated, we irrationally indulge a view that loads what is essentially an electrochemical flowchart with impossible hopes, dreams, and assumptions.
The consequences of this thinking—or should I say, this lack of thinking, this assuming—are dire. Where, in fact, are consequence, morality or ethics, creativity, or humanity in this picture? The answer is, nowhere.
None of this is to argue against brain research. Far from it. Someone near to me is recovering from a closed head injury, and I am in awe of and grateful to the doctors and researchers who have helped with his recovery and helped us to understand what has occurred and what is occuring. I wish them all speed and good fortune in learning more and more about how the brain works and, when necessary, how to help it heal. But medicine is not (or not necessarily) meaning.
To bring this back to the education of students in a school, we have to acknowledge that we do not serve them well if we freight them with our superstitions, no matter how fervently we believe them.
And, in 2110, no parent will want a teacher to teach science using today’s textbook.
In teaching science, then, to avoid a version of the presentist fallacy, it’s important to retain a sense for what is fact—and how we know it’s a fact—what is supposition or hypothesis, and what is plain unquestioned assumption (which, pejoratively, we may call superstition). And textbooks are generally not good at this; they too often present science not as a creative process, but as a finished product, as dogma.
Here's one example. If I had to vote for the greatest illusion or superstition of our age, I would say it’s the illusion that the brain thinks. (Not that you don't need a brain in order to think, but that you think; the brain is an instrument. And a metaphor.)
Assume everything we know of the brain and neurons and neural activity is true—it isn’t, it can’t be, and there’s a lot we just don’t even pretend we know. Picture a vast network of electrochemical activity among neurons, impulses racing this way and that. Picture it down to the smallest activity of an ion across a membrane. Picture it in its trillion-connection complexity. And realize that, if you want to find, say, a thought or an emotion, there’s no there there.
Eventually, for instance, if only in a thought experiment, we could draw all the connections and interactions in a brain, down to the molecular, atomic, or subatomic level; give us a whiteboard large enough, sufficient time, and any tools we need. (Yes, indeterminacy and entanglement might make our comprehension impossible, but these just substitute scientific magic for the old fashioned kind.)
Let us chart the “action potentials” of neural impulses, and the movement and effects of neurotransmitter fluids. (Did you know that the impulse along an auditory nerve is the same—exactly the same—as the impulse along an optic nerve? Watching the impulse pass, you simply cannot tell if this chemical activity relates to vision or to hearing; the impulse is void of quality. Why do we suppose that following it down the rabbit hole of complexity into which it vanishes will yield insight?) What we won’t find is a single thought, emotion, or memory, although—and even this is supposition—we may find the correlates or material or organizational traces of these. We may well be able to look at a configuration of neurons or molecules or particles—now represented in marker on our whiteboard—and correlate some brain configuration with some emotional state or thought, but it should be clear that the configuration is not and can never be an emotion or a thought or anything else that is fundamental to human experience or value.
(We can successfully perform this same thought experiment, however, with a computer. In the computer, if we know how to read the code, we can discover exactly what’s stored there, what’s calculated there, and so on. That’s because the computer isn’t conscious, isn’t thinking, isn’t feeling, isn’t anything but an apparatus, despite our science fiction fantasies. What’s in the computer is what we put there. The computer’s “activity” may yield startling and counter-intuitive results; it may “solve” problems of complexity beyond that of smart human beings in many lifetimes. But the thinking behind this work doesn’t reside in the machinery. It is available through the ingenuity and creativity of the programmers.
When we say that the brain is a computer—unless we are speaking metaphorically—we are not only making a category error, we have things exactly backward. One aspect or set of aspects of the brain is computer-like, but let’s not forget that minds and brains existed for a long, long time before the computer, and that the computer existed in the work and minds of those, like Charles Pierce and Charles Babbidge, who imagined the computer before the technology existed that could bring it to reality.)
I’m not disputing the association and correlation of brain activity with thinking, perceiving, emoting, breathing, heart-beating, or running. You need a brain to do brain-associated things. A pianist needs a piano, and preferably a well-functioning one. But when we say, for example, that “the brain thinks,” we indulge a supposition that not only has not been demonstrated, we irrationally indulge a view that loads what is essentially an electrochemical flowchart with impossible hopes, dreams, and assumptions.
The consequences of this thinking—or should I say, this lack of thinking, this assuming—are dire. Where, in fact, are consequence, morality or ethics, creativity, or humanity in this picture? The answer is, nowhere.
None of this is to argue against brain research. Far from it. Someone near to me is recovering from a closed head injury, and I am in awe of and grateful to the doctors and researchers who have helped with his recovery and helped us to understand what has occurred and what is occuring. I wish them all speed and good fortune in learning more and more about how the brain works and, when necessary, how to help it heal. But medicine is not (or not necessarily) meaning.
To bring this back to the education of students in a school, we have to acknowledge that we do not serve them well if we freight them with our superstitions, no matter how fervently we believe them.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Contradictions, contradictions
I sip my coffee watching Morning Joe on MSNBC. A couple of mornings ago, within the space of two breaths, Joe Scarborough lauded a plan to nationalize math and reading teaching--"national textbooks" in these subjects--and blasted a politician who opposed the creation of more charter schools in New York.
Huh?
Doesn't he see that charter schools succeed--when they do succeed; it's not a given that they will--by not following the path that leads to a national curriculum?
Or that a national curriculum in a nation as diverse as the U.S. is senseless?
But, I fear, his views represent too many of us.
Huh?
Doesn't he see that charter schools succeed--when they do succeed; it's not a given that they will--by not following the path that leads to a national curriculum?
Or that a national curriculum in a nation as diverse as the U.S. is senseless?
But, I fear, his views represent too many of us.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
More on Administration...
The following entry is in response to this comment:
Dear Steve, I came across your blog for the first time today and was impressed by [the] exchange on school governance. A writer myself, I am very interested in education and foundation lessons, which really get to the heart of the matter. I really responded to your words and was curious to know your specific thoughts on Administration, and what advice you would give to others on best practice.
In this piece, you also talk about structure, and I wondered what was lightest possible administrative structure you've encountered or could envisage?
Yours most warmly,
Nicola
First (I’m assuming you have some familiarity with Waldorf schools; if not, I’d be happy to answer questions), Rudolf Steiner never said that Waldorf schools should be “faculty run;” the phrase he used was “self-administered,” by which I believe he meant “not administered by the state.” Which is to say, much more the case for U.S. schools than for most European schools—we have always enjoyed greater local control and freedom in how we educate our youth than have nations with more powerful ministries of education. (I’ve read that the Federal government provides roughly 10% of educational funding in the U.S. and 90% of the—mostly unfunded—directives and mandates.)
Given this, it’s really tough to say that a good administrator in a Waldorf school should be somehow different (beyond her commitment to the mission of the school) from an administrator at another school. In my experience, the toughest part of the administrator’s job is gaining the trust of the teachers. For this reason alone, it may be good for Waldorf schools to select an experienced teacher to hold this position. The problem is that it’s a rare teacher who can be a good administrator. And if the administrator is seen by parents as being partial to teachers’ points of view, trust erodes quickly.
On the other hand, the peculiar structure of Waldorf schools requires any administrator to adapt to the school. By this, I refer primarily to the tension that often exists among parents, boards, and teachers’ councils or colleges, especially when times are tough. Most Waldorf schools, by bylaw or practice, for example, simply don’t give the power to hire and fire to one person. So an administrator, then, becomes a diplomat—lots of responsibility, little authority—carrying messages from one camp to the other, attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
When you ask about minimal structure, I think of the school at which I currently work. I’m a full-time teacher and the only (part-time) administrator. We have an office manager/assistant here three mornings a week. We have an off-site, hourly bookkeeper, and a volunteer treasurer. Teachers pitch in to help with admissions events, open houses, and so on. Trustees (volunteers) handle fundraising. Our Core Faculty (about 7 teachers) meets weekly. Our Board meets monthly. We have as close to no administrative structure as it’s possible to have, I believe.
By contrast, I know a school that was advised by a highly paid professional to hire a full-time fundraiser. The school did this and, three years in, has yet to raise close to the cost of the fundraiser’s salary and benefits. And I don’t believe this is a comment on the fundraiser’s ability—more on the school’s inability to see that their situation, despite the recommendation of a consultant, simply doesn’t warrant one full-time person devoted to development.
In creating structure, it’s too easy, I believe, to copy what everyone else does—admissions officer, development, business manager, administrator, etc.—even when the numbers don’t justify it.
This brings up another point, which is that of scale. Small schools can break even; large schools can break even. Smallish schools that act like large schools, however, will lose money. And no private school can afford to do that for long. And there is a “deadly middle ground.” For many private schools, it occurs between roughly 60 students and 150-200 students. This middle ground is precisely where many Waldorf high schools find themselves, unfortunately.
In growing from a small school to a larger school, schools add administration as they grow, and are happy for the increase in students. When, a few years later, perhaps, enrollment declines, rather than facing the actuality of the situation (there was a time when they would have been overjoyed to have as many students as they are now groaning about), they often freeze salaries, cut salaries, add to workloads or otherwise diminish the morale of the school.
Which brings up another point: When schools act like their real business is providing support for a community of like-minded adults, rather than doing all they can to educate the children in their care as well as possible (and, in the process, spend the parents’ tuition dollars as wisely and efficiently as possible), they quickly lose their way, creating a vicious spiral that leads to further loss of enrollment…
I don’t know if this addresses your basic questions; sorry if it contains too much opinion or too many digressions…
Dear Steve, I came across your blog for the first time today and was impressed by [the] exchange on school governance. A writer myself, I am very interested in education and foundation lessons, which really get to the heart of the matter. I really responded to your words and was curious to know your specific thoughts on Administration, and what advice you would give to others on best practice.
In this piece, you also talk about structure, and I wondered what was lightest possible administrative structure you've encountered or could envisage?
Yours most warmly,
Nicola
First (I’m assuming you have some familiarity with Waldorf schools; if not, I’d be happy to answer questions), Rudolf Steiner never said that Waldorf schools should be “faculty run;” the phrase he used was “self-administered,” by which I believe he meant “not administered by the state.” Which is to say, much more the case for U.S. schools than for most European schools—we have always enjoyed greater local control and freedom in how we educate our youth than have nations with more powerful ministries of education. (I’ve read that the Federal government provides roughly 10% of educational funding in the U.S. and 90% of the—mostly unfunded—directives and mandates.)
Given this, it’s really tough to say that a good administrator in a Waldorf school should be somehow different (beyond her commitment to the mission of the school) from an administrator at another school. In my experience, the toughest part of the administrator’s job is gaining the trust of the teachers. For this reason alone, it may be good for Waldorf schools to select an experienced teacher to hold this position. The problem is that it’s a rare teacher who can be a good administrator. And if the administrator is seen by parents as being partial to teachers’ points of view, trust erodes quickly.
On the other hand, the peculiar structure of Waldorf schools requires any administrator to adapt to the school. By this, I refer primarily to the tension that often exists among parents, boards, and teachers’ councils or colleges, especially when times are tough. Most Waldorf schools, by bylaw or practice, for example, simply don’t give the power to hire and fire to one person. So an administrator, then, becomes a diplomat—lots of responsibility, little authority—carrying messages from one camp to the other, attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement.
When you ask about minimal structure, I think of the school at which I currently work. I’m a full-time teacher and the only (part-time) administrator. We have an office manager/assistant here three mornings a week. We have an off-site, hourly bookkeeper, and a volunteer treasurer. Teachers pitch in to help with admissions events, open houses, and so on. Trustees (volunteers) handle fundraising. Our Core Faculty (about 7 teachers) meets weekly. Our Board meets monthly. We have as close to no administrative structure as it’s possible to have, I believe.
By contrast, I know a school that was advised by a highly paid professional to hire a full-time fundraiser. The school did this and, three years in, has yet to raise close to the cost of the fundraiser’s salary and benefits. And I don’t believe this is a comment on the fundraiser’s ability—more on the school’s inability to see that their situation, despite the recommendation of a consultant, simply doesn’t warrant one full-time person devoted to development.
In creating structure, it’s too easy, I believe, to copy what everyone else does—admissions officer, development, business manager, administrator, etc.—even when the numbers don’t justify it.
This brings up another point, which is that of scale. Small schools can break even; large schools can break even. Smallish schools that act like large schools, however, will lose money. And no private school can afford to do that for long. And there is a “deadly middle ground.” For many private schools, it occurs between roughly 60 students and 150-200 students. This middle ground is precisely where many Waldorf high schools find themselves, unfortunately.
In growing from a small school to a larger school, schools add administration as they grow, and are happy for the increase in students. When, a few years later, perhaps, enrollment declines, rather than facing the actuality of the situation (there was a time when they would have been overjoyed to have as many students as they are now groaning about), they often freeze salaries, cut salaries, add to workloads or otherwise diminish the morale of the school.
Which brings up another point: When schools act like their real business is providing support for a community of like-minded adults, rather than doing all they can to educate the children in their care as well as possible (and, in the process, spend the parents’ tuition dollars as wisely and efficiently as possible), they quickly lose their way, creating a vicious spiral that leads to further loss of enrollment…
I don’t know if this addresses your basic questions; sorry if it contains too much opinion or too many digressions…
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