 
Week 4 - Local School Management
|  | Back to the Past May Preserve the Future |
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Listing of Papers | |
MR HENRY GRAY
Northern Territory, Australia
IT'S SOMETIMES SAID that the only thing constant about education is change. Change, it seems, is often for change's sake. The adage, 'if it's not broken, don't fix it', seems not to apply to the educational domain.
Moving in a Fast Car
Metaphorically, education is like a car, a very fast car. We educators are the drivers. We are whirling toward the thrill and excitement of an unknown future with scant recall of the past, and without really taking time to digest the present. Occasionally we flick our eyes upward and into the rear view mirror. We don't see the environmental set fading rapidly into the background. Rather, we are looking to see that we are ahead of other futurists ... ever so essential if we are to stamp our image and leave our imprint on the system.
Focusing Education on Children
Paradigm shifts in education during the past decade, and even before that, have not always been helpful for children. In a modern educational era, where devolution (the development of self-managed independent government schools) has been to the fore, it sometimes seems that basic educational precepts have taken a back seat.
More and more, schools are beholden to the management of the almighty dollar. What we can get, and how we can gain more dollars, occupies attention and concentrates the focus of principals all over Australia and in developed countries around the world. In this context, how well do principals know the children in our schools? How well do we know our teachers? How well do we know what they are doing in the teaching/learning context? How well do we know them as people?
A Refreshing Genesis
In 1978 the Northern Territory Education Department was declared an independent educational entity, responsible to the Northern Territory Government. Re-establishment was the order of the day, redefining priorities a part of our new look. In 1978, I was a relative newcomer to school principalship in the NT. Along with a few neophyte peers, and together with many experienced principal colleagues, I attended a Principals Conference in Katherine, 320 kilometres south of Darwin.
Words delivered by the then Secretary of Education, Dr Jim Eedle, have remained etched in my mind since that time. Dr Eedle told us that 'schools are for children'.
He said that structure should serve function and that function was about the delivery of a quality education to those attending our schools.
Avoid Structure for Structure's Sake
While not thinking much about the ramifications of this at the time, I now believe Dr Eedle was cautioning us never to allow 'structure to develop for structure's sake'. That it should always be underpinned by carefully considered functional premises.
Jim Eedle challenged educators to fix their sights carefully upon educational values. To him, the needs of children were of paramount importance. What he said to us that day has remained the steadfast centrepiece of my personal educational focus.
Devolution has Changed the Educational Paradigm
Throughout the late 1980s, the 1990s and into 2000, outsourcing has been, and continues to be, the name of the educational game in Australia and elsewhere around the world. Schools have been offered operational responsibilities, together with dollars, to support management precepts. School communities have been invited to establish functional priorities within the framework of systemic curriculum requirements.
Terminology has changed. Principals are more often designated as 'school managers' or simply 'managers', rather than as 'educational leaders'. A plethora of administrative responsibilities have been 'down lined'. Principals are designated as School Executive Officers to their school councils, school boards or similar governing bodies.
Negotiated change has been accepted because, by and large, school communities feel comfortable with localisation of responsibility and its attendant accountabilities. Within a carefully considered operational context, the acceptance of the self-managed independent school premise ought not to weaken the educational opportunities offered to children.
At a symposium of 250 educators and parents held in Darwin in 1992, this notion was carefully reinforced. The symposium was addressed by Professor Fenton Sharpe, a past Director of Education in NSW and Mr Dean Ashenden, a leading educational consultant. Both enunciated their belief that economic rationalism, the fact that we have fewer dollars and greater accountability, was an inevitability. It had been forced in all parts of Australia, and globally, by the economic circumstances of our times. Making do, and being more resourceful, were measures necessary when there was simply not enough money and resources to go around. But devolution to schools did not hang on this factor.
Managing Education for Student Outcomes
Professor Sharpe indicated that devolution was about managing education for the sake of student outcomes. Teaching and learning were, and would remain, central and critical elements. Imposed on this paradigm was the perspective of councils, parents involved in consultation with staff about educational developments and learning outcomes. Resources were material artifacts. Resources aided teachers and parents, partners working together to make education meaningful for students. Dean Ashenden's stress was that devolution should improve what students learn and how they develop. He suggested that schools focus on improving what they do well - teaching.
Real devolution would mean high productivity in student learning outcomes. It would mean students prepared to accept the challenge of education, appreciating what was offered, and positively managing their studies.
Spirit, not structure, is necessary to generate outcomes, said Ashenden: 'We must go into and about devolution with the right spirit and with a positive frame of mind'.
The 2000 Focus is Defocusing
Eight years past this significant forum, things have changed. Many of us are principals with executive status, filling a multivariate management role set. Our days - and often our nights - are devoted to a multitude of management tasks. We are accountants, bookkeepers, financial advisers, money market managers, meeting conveners, people who often spend more time at planning and organisational conferences and meetings than we do in our schools. Our management acumen and system-wide knowledge is increasing. We are consulted and increasingly contribute to the wider domain of Education Department process and interdepartmental interface.
In that context, we are managers responding to politically motivated demands. We may be managers, but are we independent? Blackmore (1999: 13) suggests that devolution to self-managing schools:
'... has enabled governments to steer education through policies and frameworks faxing ... crisis down the line ... strong accountability feeding back up the line (including) performance management, school charters, reviews (and) standardised assessment'.
Principals have been caught up in this scenario. Initially, they wanted to be part of change processes. With the passing of time, consolidation and cementing of policies has outed optionality, absolutely requiring principals to be part of this process. Blackmore elaborates:
'Policy is conceived at the centre; implementation problems are devolved to local level. This separation allows governments (and CEOs) to deflect attention away from the radical reduction of educational expenditure by faxing the crisis down the line, while claiming the credit for greater efficiencies and making local decision makers - ie, principals and school councils - accountable for the effects, all in the name of parental choice.' (op cit)
Professor Frederick Wirt, in 1992, cautioned that: ' ... education is ... losing its professional aura ... Its independence has yielded to ... economic motif, a new paradigm...' (Wirt, 1992, p.3) He elaborated:
'Overlaying these influences is a way of thinking about schooling, by using market mechanisms ... The result is that the educational practitioner is under greater pressure to be more accountable ... by means of more evaluation, more pressure from stakeholders and more responsiveness to higher governments. All these make for ... politicization ...' (op. cit.)
Over all, and through all, education must remain a human enterprise. Regardless of imperatives and paradigm shifts, and notwithstanding the priorities governments require their Education Departments to pursue, there are factors that will, and must, remain constant:
- relations between all parties to the educational process must remain in place;
- outcomes must be determined by the quality of the educational partnership that is established and maintained between parents, teachers and children;
- parental aspirations for children must remain high;
- application of resources to enhance teaching inputs and learning outcomes must be an absolute priority;
- human relations must be of greater importance than supporting technologies. Every aspect of the educational enterprise must be supportive of, but subordinate to, the sometimes overlooked principle that schools are there to prepare our next generation of adults and leaders.
The Rhetorical Question
Are we educators or mere managers of the educational process? Do we know the children in our schools? Do they know us? Are we an integral part of our school establishments or increasingly removed from our domain of prime focus and responsibility?
I try hard to do what is necessary to make my school one that works well and offers quality educational outcomes. To me, the utterances of Jim Eedle, Fenton Sharpe and Dean Ashenden retain their currency. What these three wise men have had to say may not address economic rationality. Their advice, however, directs us toward educational destiny.
I sincerely hope that we are able to retain or, if necessary, to revisit education as being values-focused, not merely process-driven. Structure must exist for the sake of enhancing function. Everything we do within the management of our educational domain ought to underpin the critical remembrance clause: Schools are for children.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I commenced my teaching career in 1970, having entered training college as a mature age student. I have taught in remote, town and urban schools in both Western Australia and the Northern Territory. My principalship in NT schools encompasses the past 29 years. I hold the degrees of Graduate Diploma in Intercultural Studies, Master of Educational Studies and Master of International Management.
I am a member of various relevant professional associations and was president of the Northern Territory Principals Association from 1992 until 1996. I have undertaken research into the role of School Based Police and completed a major study (1997) on the subject of 'Student Councils Organisations Empowering Primary School Students As Decision Makers'.
I have a three-part mission statement:
to fulfill, and be fulfilled, in organisational mode:- family, work, recreation;
to acquit my responsibilities with integrity, and,
to work with a smile in my heart.
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REFERENCES
Blackmore, Jill (1999). Framing the Issues for Educational Re-Design, Learning Networks and Professional Activism, (Australian Council for Educational Administration monograph), Craftsman Press, Burwood, November.
Wirt, Frederick M. (1992). The Centre will not Hold; Administrative Practice and Training in the U S. Paper presented to the conference on 'The Emerging Culture of Educational Administration', Australian Council for Educational Administration, Darwin, July 5-8, 1992.
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