Tina gives a personal slant on what administrators must be going through:
My sincere hope is that my own administrator could see her way into working with me to trust my professional judgement and somehow fit my vision into the rubric. My sincere hope is that she can begin to see the rubric for what it is – a tool connected to the for-profit, privatized, corporate model by forces that are eroding our experiment in multicultural democracy at an ever-increasing pace. My hope is that she can put true human connection and learning before the grid lines on a rubric, and not the other way around.
My sincere hope for my administrator is humility and a realization that teachers need compassion and to be trusted as professionals and to be PROTECTED. That understanding, if she truly grasped it, would make our building or department a much happier place, a special place where she would begin to attract people who appreciated her support and loving kindness and her protection because she is a person with a lot of strength and could be a mighty citadel for her teachers. If she could only see that admin and teachers could be fighting arm in arm against this “reform” movement.
My sincere hope is that we can all, gently and slowly, patiently and compassionately, help our administrators grow into a role of beloved and cherished fortresses in the war against true and deep education in the real sense of the word.
My sincere hope is that we are strong enough and united enough to keep up the administrator education and liberation that they so desperately need, with all the pressures that are on them, to help them find the strength to resist the forces of “reform” that are causing us all so much suffering.