12 Winters Blog

Spoiler Alert: School Boards and School Administrators

The following is excerpted from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Aspects of Expressive Writing: The International Lectures, and specifically from the new commentary I am writing for each of the eight lectures. This excerpt is from Lecture 4, “Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Creative Writer,” delivered remotely as the principal seminar lecture to the National University of Modern Languages in Islamabad, Pakistan, in 2024, hosted by the Department of English and arranged by Dr. Amina Ghazanfar.

This excerpt is being published simultaneously at Twelve Winters Miscellany.

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I retired from full-time teaching (high school) in 2021, and an unstated consensus remained that technology, in all its forms, made schools better, made students smarter—minus any evidence, and really for decades minus any serious effort to determine if it’s true. The tech industry sold this snake oil to society, and society gulped it down. I have already drifted far afield from the lecture’s topic, psychoanalytic criticism, but while I’m here I must drift a bit further. The sad state of affairs in the U.S. (with Trump and the GOP taking a wrecking-ball to the Constitution as well as common decency, meanwhile promoting the rise of every kind of vile hate one can imagine) leads many to point a finger at our education system. How could it have produced a citizenry that would be so easily duped by Fox News and nitwits like Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson? How could it embrace a well-documented liar, conman, sexual predator, and all-around sleazebag like Donald Trump?

What can we do as a nation to improve our schools and prevent such miscarriages of democracy in the future?

Well, here’s something: Put teaching in the hands of teachers. No improvements in the effectiveness of education are going to take place unless some fundamental and systemic changes take place. The two biggest problems in education are school boards and administrators. Public schools are run omnipotently by a group of non-educators elected from the community. Sometimes they may be retired educators or educators not connected to the school, but almost always they are people who have no training and no experience in teaching. They may be well meaning, but oftentimes people run for school boards with specific agendas and axes to grind. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that all members of school boards have nefarious intentions. I am saying that it is ridiculous to put a group of people elected from the community in charge of schools when they have no qualifications whatsoever to make educationally sound decisions.

Educating children—especially nowadays—is one of the most complex and challenging professions someone can undertake. Yet well-trained and experienced educators have practically no agency when it comes to making decisions within their school. The board of untrained and inexperienced community members (car salesmen, bank managers, farmers, insurance agents, bar owners, handymen, homemakers, bakers, tinkers, tailors, and candlestick makers) have total control over every decision: whom to hire, whom to fire; what curriculum to approve, which textbooks to buy; what technology to purchase, how it should be implemented; how each penny should be allocated, which contractors should be hired for this or that project. Every decision ends up in the hands of these untrained school board members.

Well o.k., you say, but they’re not operating in the dark. They’re making decisions based on recommendations that are provided to them by the administration, i.e., the superintendent (perhaps assistant superintendents, of curriculum, of transportation, of facilities) and the building administrators (principal, vice principal, vocational director, athletic director, possibly special education director, et al.). True enough, but one might assume that the cream rises to the top, and best-of-the-best teachers become administrators; therefore, the most qualified, most experienced educators assume the mantle of administration. Sometimes, of course, really gifted teachers become administrators, but based on my nearly four decades of experience this metamorphosis is the exception. For one thing, really gifted teachers are gifted with a love of teaching. They truly enjoy being with their students and facilitating and nurturing their skills and intellect. They have no desire to leave the classroom and with it the thrill of exercising a skillset they have mastered—a mastery that requires melding science and art and empathy. Just as Yoyo Ma has no desire to give up the cello, nor Spielberg filmmaking. A teacher who flourishes in the classroom will unlikely flourish in the role of administrator, a job of pandering to pushy parents, of milling paperwork (budgets, formal requests, mandated reports, assessment criteria, legislative updates), of disciplining unruly students, of kowtowing to higherups (especially those untrained school board members).

It’s true that sometimes, sometimes really talented teachers are lured from the classroom to the administrative office, mainly because the discrepancy in pay is so profound. Figures vary widely from state to state, and even within a state, like my home state of Illinois, the numbers can vary significantly, between, say, a well-heeled Chicago suburb and a small town in the sparsely populated southern part of the state. According to recent data, however, the average teacher salary is about $76,000 annually, while the average principal’s is at least double that, ranging from around $145,000 to $165,000. For assistant principal (usually a school’s chief disciplinarian) the average is around $127,000. Meanwhile, the top dog, the superintendent, pulls in between $142,000 and $250,000 (according to the Illinois Report Card, 2024-25).

Granted, school administrators are generally on an 11-month or full-year contract, whereas classroom teacher pay is based on a 9-month (180-day) contract. Yet the statement “Teachers have the summer off” is a fiction on its face. Teachers aren’t getting paid, but they’re still developing curriculum, taking courses, advancing in their degrees, increasing their content knowledge through reading and travel, making materials for their classrooms, attending conferences and professional assemblies, and myriad other teaching-related activities. They’re not getting paid, but they’re still being teachers, even in the allegedly lazy days of summer.

So, if really talented teachers, by and large, aren’t becoming administrators, who is? In the upper grades the clear majority is men, and often these men are former coaches. Hard data is difficult to come by, but it seems to be a universal phenomenon, the tendency for school administrators to come up through the coaching ranks, which also means they tend to hail from nonacademic fields of education—physical education of course, drivers education, vocational ed., perhaps business and accounting. There are several factors that likely contribute to the phenomenon. For one, the lower rungs of the administrative ladder are tailormade for coaching types. In larger school districts, “athletic director” is an administrative post; in really large districts one may have an “assistant superintendent of athletics” (alongside an assistant superintendent of finance, an assistant superintendent of transportation, an assistant superintendent of facilities, etc.).

In more modest-size school districts, the A.D. position is commonly combined with the job of a high school’s vice or assistant principal, who is the school’s chief disciplinarian (the dude who is supposed to intimidate unruly students back into line and physically break up fights when necessary). It makes sense, then, that you would hire a coach, who understands the intricacies of an athletic program (hiring coaches, ordering uniforms and equipment, organizing schedules, arranging transportation, building budgets, and so on—the responsibilities are many and intricate). Moreover, it makes sense that you would want your chief disciplinarian (the person scaring kids straight and breaking up fights) to be a big guy, maybe a former football or basketball player, turned football or basketball coach. Thus, a lot of coaches are ushered into the administrative ranks because they have the background and the physical presence for these lower-order positions.

But these athletic directors and vice principals almost always have their sights set on grander things, like becoming building principals and perhaps even, one day, superintendents. When there are openings, internally or at other school districts, these large men (hired mainly for their girth and their ability to move a blocking-sled several yards) now have experience as administrators, and so their applications move to the head of the line, placed before those other teachers with administrative credentials but no administrative experience (perhaps too small or too athletically inexperienced to have been hired as vice principals and A.D.s). Before long, many of those ex-coaches do become principals; meanwhile, they acquire their superintendency endorsement, and, lo and behold!, superintendent jobs become available, and the applicants with experience as building principals are those ex-coaches.

To be fair, these coach-types who achieve the upper echelons as school administrators may possess qualities that make them effective leaders. They have a tendency to exude confidence, which can be motivating for a staff of teachers. They may have top-flight organizational skills, and they may be very good with budgets and the many mundanities that are part and parcel of running a school or a whole district. Unfortunately their responsibilities encompass other things, in fact, essentially every other thing: curriculum development and delivery, purchasing priorities, teacher trainings, teacher hirings and firings, teacher evaluations, teacher contracts, as well as dealing with the public and with those seven noneducators who are, ultimately, in charge of everything, the school board, a.k.a. the board of education.

The common-coach-to-administrator path results in administrations that are quite adept at organizing and nurturing athletic programs but largely clueless when it comes to nurturing the academic side of the school equation. My experience has been that these ex-coaches aren’t especially critically minded when it comes to decision-making. Thus, they tend to take at face value much of the snake oil pitches lobbed their way, which leads to their forcing into the curriculum and the classroom methods and materials that are ineffective or actually counterproductive. And one can imagine how frustrating it is for the experts in charge of delivering instruction when they can see so clearly and so obviously why this or that method or material is wrongheaded in so many ways. Yet they are forced to employ them with their students. They are forced, in essence, to commit pedagogical malpractice, again and again and again.

There has been a well-documented mass exodus of teachers from the classroom. Learning Policy Institute published a report March 17, 2026, that said 7% to 8% of teachers in the U.S. leave the profession annually (i.e., approximately 600,000 teachers); and as many as half of new teachers quit within five years. There are myraid reasons why teachers—new, mid-career, and veteran—may walk out of the classroom never to return. People will cite low pay, which is true; people will cite exponentially mounting responsibilities, which is true; people will cite increasingly unmanageable children and parents, which is true; and people will cite lack of respect, which is true—and it is this last one that I believe is the main reason dedicated teachers give up on teaching. But it’s not society’s general disrespect, per se, a kind of external disrespect. Rather, it’s the internal disrespect, the disrespect within each teacher’s specific educational environment. No matter how much classroom experience a teacher acquires, no matter how much advanced education in their field and degrees they obtain, no matter how professionally they conduct themselves and their careers, their agency within the school system remains the impotent agency of a first-year teacher; that is, practically nil. They forever have to answer to those ex-coach administrators and those untrained school board members. They forever have to follow their asinine directives, enforce their dipshit policies, and embrace their farcical educational philosophies. Time and again, they are mandated to do things that run counter to their knowledge and experience—then, time and again, they are blamed for the failings of their students, for the failings of their school . . . and ultimately for the failings of their society.

Schoolteachers are routinely faced with the outright aggressive behavior of parents and students (and administrators at times), but almost daily their lack of professional agency is illustrated. Decisions are made and actions are taken by “superiors” who are not qualified to teach their subject matter, and who, eventually, have a fraction of their experience in the classroom (most administrators exit the classroom after only a few years of teaching). Here is one concrete illustration, from one of my last years of teaching high school. It was not part of my normal teaching schedule, but I was assigned a low-ability sophomore English class. Several of the students had Individual Education Programs (I.E.P.s). I don’t recall the exact assignment (something based on one of our readings), but it was a writing assignment. The school was really into Chromebook labs, these rolling racks of laptops that could be moved from room to room, and they were connected to the school’s network for internet access, etc. My students spent a class period writing a draft of their paper on the Chromebooks; at the end I instructed them to print their drafts so that we could work on editing and revising them. Alas, the Chromebooks were not connected to the printer in the old-fangled stationary lab across the hall (a lab that was designated for use by others, which is why I had to request a mobile lab in the first place). A minor hiccup. I put in a tech request with our I.T. guys to work their magic and connect the Chromebook lab to the printer via the network, the sort of thing they did all the time, connecting this tech to that tech along the ever-expanding yet invisible tentacles of the network.

I would have my students print their drafts the next day. No problem. Writers and teachers of writing know that people are able to edit text more effectively when it’s on paper, much more effectively in fact. Study after study has demonstrated it. Reading on paper leads to deeper comprehension, while reading on the screen is more superficial, rendering errors and other issues more easily missed. And these were students who had some cognitive processing issues. I was trying to facilitate their success with this specific assignment, but I was also hoping to establish a pattern whereby they would always print their drafts for editing and revising.

Well, the building principal (a former business teacher and athletic coach) had to approve all tech requests (something I didn’t know), and he wouldn’t approve mine. He wouldn’t let the I.T. guys connect the Chromebook lab to the printer across the hall because “it was going backward” (they told me). So, this administrator, who wasn’t a writer, beyond writing emails and filling out bureaucratic forms, believed that editing a draft on paper was passé, and that all editing and revising should be done on the screen, even for struggling students. He didn’t even bother to consult with me before rejecting the request.

These are the kinds of microaggressions that schoolteachers have to deal with day in and day out. They spend years accumulating knowledge and experience, earning advanced degrees in their subject matter, and yet their expertise is ignored by the untrained, unqualified, inexperienced few at the top of the pedagogical pyramid.

The evaluation system for teachers is especially emblematic of this lack of agency and respect. In most school districts, teachers are evaluated throughout their careers as if they were nontenured newbies, and the process includes observations of the teacher in the act of teaching their students. Setting aside the artificiality of the whole enterprise due to the Hawthorne effect (i.e., the observer effect)—the artificiality and the likely inaccuracy—teachers eventually reach a point where the person doing the observing and assessing and judgment-passing is inappropriately unqualified to do so. Depending on the hierarchy of the school, which depends on its size and administrative complexity, various people will be involved in the evaluating and observing of classroom teachers. For simplicity’s sake, let’s think of the building principal as the evaluator (which is common). It’s reasonable that they observe, offer advice, and assign some level of proficiency to newer, less experienced teachers (generally nontenured teachers). Meanwhile, though, if the teacher continues in the profession, they accumulate more and more experience, and more and more expertise in their field (by taking subject-matter courses, acquiring advanced degrees, attending conferences, presenting at conferences, perhaps writing and publishing in their field . . . not to mention the expertise that comes with having taught a subject for a number of years).

All of which leads to the situation where a principal is responsible for evaluating someone who is more experienced and more qualified than they are. In a junior high or high school setting the subject areas are quite diverse (English, math, biology, chemistry, history, business, health, et al.), and yet the principal was probably only certified to teach in one of those areas (health, let’s say); and because they became an administrator early in their career (became an athletic director or vice principal), they had only a few years as a classroom teacher. Therefore, a former health teacher, with less than a decade of classroom experience, is in the elevated position of observing, assessing and passing judgment on a teacher with twenty or thirty years of classroom experience and a master’s or even a Ph.D. in their subject area (English or calculus or chemistry).

Clear-headed administrators will realize they have nothing of value to offer the highly qualified classroom teacher, so the process becomes a rubber-stamping formality that must be ritualistically performed every other year. Unfortunately there are wrongheaded, egotistical and axe-grinding administrators who freely offer advice on the teaching of a subject they themselves are neither qualified nor certified to teach. They will nitpick for any rationale to give a lower-order evaluation to a teacher they don’t like on a personal level, or just because they don’t want to be seen as a pushover who gives “excellent” marks to everyone. Some people (educational consultants, school board members) believe that there should be a spread of evaluation marks, statistically. That is, not all teachers can be excellent; some, surely, must be satisfactory, and some, surely, must be unsatisfactory.

Yes, of course, some educators excel more so than others, but they may all be excellent in their field.

Let me use a sports metaphor; golf, say. Yes, one golfer wins the Masters, others get second place or third place, top 10, top 25, etc.; and yes, some golfers miss the cut after 36 holes and leave Augusta National early. But every golfer who qualified to play in the Masters in the first place is excellent at golf. You wouldn’t say the players who finished in the top 10 are excellent, and the rest of the field who made the cut are satisfactory at golf, and the half of the field that missed the cut are unsatisfactory at golf. Therefore, it’s more than reasonable—it’s expected—that every teacher who accumulates years of classroom experience and works at advancing in their subject expertise is excellent at teaching. Some may win the Masters, some may miss the cut after 36 holes—but they’re all excellent at teaching. Why, then, would you give them less-than-excellent ratings just to satisfy some unqualified person’s misguided notions about the evaluation process and the way data ought to align on a graph?

I’ve gone much further afield here than intended, but I so frequently here experts weigh in regarding the education crisis and the exodus of teachers from the classroom, and not once have I heard one even mention the root cause of both issues: the wrong people are in charge of the system. Majority-elected noneducators wield all the power, based on the advice of the least-experienced, least-qualified “educators” who wear the mantle of “administrator” and reside at the top of the hierarchy. To fix education—and produce a citizenry that can tell valid information from villainous propaganda—schoolteachers must be put in charge of schools; and the most-qualified, highest-achieving among them should ascend to positions of authority in each school setting. A system that does that—lets the best and brightest rise to the top (instead of the largest and loudest)—could assume any number of forms, but it’s vital that the administrative educators (who perform the equivalent functions of “principal,” “vice principal,” and so on) must continue to teach part of the time. The world changes so rapidly, technology changes so rapidly, kids change so rapidly—educators who leave the classroom rapidly become out-of-touch with the types of students they’re tasked with teaching.

As things stand now, an administrator who hasn’t taught in a decade may as well have taught Depression-era tykes who walked to school after milking Bessie and giving a ladle of unpasteurized milk to each of their little brothers and sisters, raggedly dressed in homespun hand-me-downs. In 2026, the students of 2016 were a different breed of cat altogether. Imagine how clueless the principal or superintendent is who hasn’t taught in twenty or thirty years. Yet they are the ones making the recommendations to the board of the even-more-clueless whose yea or nay controls everything. Madness.

It’s no wonder that nearly a quarter of the U.S. population is functionally illiterate, and half read below a sixth-grade level— making them easy prey for propagandists and unprincipled politicians. And making the rest of us the victims of their ignorance and barely-breathing critical-thinking skills.

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Ted Morrissey is the publisher of Twelve Winters Press and its various entities, including Twelve Winters Journal, Twelve Winters Miscellany, and the podcast A Lesson before Writing, which he co-hosts with Brady Harrison and Grant Tracey. His most recent book is Aspiring Child: A Biography of Mary W. Shelley in Sonnets. He is on Instagram, Bluesky, TikTok, YouTube, and elsewhere.