When the former
principal, LLL, he is not a very effective manager,
and he had all those qualities that keep unions going. The
only reason I believe that unions have ever appeared is
because they had employers who are less than honorable and
kind of impose their will and will have it done their way and
no other way, they're autocratic, and we wouldn't have a need
for an association or union if you didn't have individuals
such as that. So he was replaced and it should have been done
-- he never should have been hired, but it should have been
recognized in six months to a year of his tenure here that he
was not the man for the job. So BBB came back because he was
the least disruptive, he knew the school, he was here before,
he's an experienced principal, he knows all the routine, all
the things that have to be done, like scheduling and budgets
and etc., so he was brought back and he was happy to be here.
He was the building level supervisor. It will be a different
kind of management team because cal is much more collaborative
in nature than LLL was and LLL didn't even show up for
our last two months of the management team meetings. The
site-based decision-making -- we're in charge of three areas:
overall budget to the school, scheduling -- what classes are
given, which programs are being offered -- and hiring of staff
that would normally be the principal's -- under his --
Q. One quick question on budgeting. When you talk about
budgeting, is that what your school system spends on supplies
or the total budget?
A. The total budget. We're given -- there are several different
kinds of budget. One is called capital where you can buy
equipment, things that last longer than a year or five years,
whatever it might be, equipment, microscopes, uniforms, other
kinds of equipment, hardware, different kinds of things,
desks, chairs, things like that. And then there are
department budgets and we get input from the department chairs
and then we decide how much each department is going to get.
We don't vote on things, we consent this, you know, our
management team; if we can't reach consensus, we leave the
area and we try something else. the idea is that -- to try
to bring about a decision that is shared by all of us and we
have a common philosophy -- the betterment of the school --
and this is a great way of teachers being empowered. We've
never had that kind of authority before, but there are
teachers who say, let the principal do his principaling and
teachers do their teaching, and never the twain shall meet.
It's a very slow process and we meet once a week for an hour
and a half at the scheduled meeting, so people give up one of
their planning hours plus a lunch in order to meet; plus an
outside time that we have to meet to discuss things prior to
coming to the meeting and time afterwards. Sometimes you
call, like today, this afternoon, we're going to have an
emergency meeting or a supplementary meeting for the
scheduling coming up, we have to decide which courses we're
going to offer, because with our limited budget we're allowed
X amount of teachers, the Ed Center tells us we're allowed so
many teachers, and how you use that staff is purely up to you.
So we'll decide whether we think that it's more important to
have more English teachers or if a new program is being
offered, whether we'll even staff it because it may be more
important at this point, because we can't afford everything,
to have something that is more of a core subject staff than
something that would ancillary or supplementary. So we -- in
this case, what has happened is the principal has to bring to
the meeting -- he has to be completely open -- and give us the
numbers. Now these are public figures, but it's very hard for
many principals to release that information because this has
been the way they have been able to manipulate and sometimes,
I wouldn't say unethically, but certainly in gray areas, not
clear black and white, you can't say they're crooks because I
don't think they are, but it was up to their judgment whether
they wanted to for instance, take you out to lunch, okay?
Take you out to lunch and pay for your lunch, and then charge
it to the students. Okay, the student fund, and there are
principals that do this. Now, you don't know this; you think
the guy's a sport, and I believe they should be a sport on
their own money, they make over $60,000, let them be a sport
on their own money, I mean, if they want to be a gentleman and
they want to do this, then they should pay for those items
themselves and not take it out of student funds. The student
funds, I believe in the strict interpretation of the law, and
saying that student funds should go back to the students. If
a student can't afford a physical, for instance, they want to
try out for sports, that, for me, is better -- the money is
being used in a way it should be as opposed to taking someone
out to lunch who may think highly of the school but --
Q. And this has been done frequently?
A. Yes, yes, and I have knowledge of that, so -- not been done
here, okay? So site-based decision-making has helped us
become empowered. But there are principals that are old world
and have not come into this century yet and don't -- are not
willing to give it up, and they're holding us back. And
hopefully they will be retiring in the next -- if we can all
last -- within the next year or two, or three tops, and then
it will have gained so much popularity it will snowball and
they will either get out of the way or they will be
ineffectual in their schools. The other thing that, let's
see, how else we're being empowered, is by having management
teams and I'm on a project called High School 2001. This was
started a couple of years ago by our superintendent. He
called the Blue Ribbon Task Force together, made up of some
faculty members, parents, community, business partnerships,
students, administrators, the whole school community, he
called this committee together, let's say there were 50 people
on it, then what they did was they wrote a list of objectives,
kind of a constitution, if you will, or a program for us to
try to achieve: this is what we want for the high school of
2001, for those kids graduating in that year, so we have to by
96/97, we have to have everything implemented. What
happened was they got together and they had a -- they had
forums in all of the high schools, and the forums were -- all
the kids were divided up into rooms and the teachers were
separate and parents came in, volunteers came in, and asked
them to write down and discuss what they would like to see
from the student's point of view in the high school 2001. And
there were thousands and thousands of responses and they were
all compiled into one document. And from that we got the --
what we call the white paper Blue Ribbon task force document -
- and that was all the objectives, what teachers want, what
students want, and the timeline and what we're going to try to
accomplish. One teacher was chosen from each high school to
be on this committee, the High School 2001 leadership team,
they call it, and our job is to meet those guidelines and try
to implement them --
Q. do you bring this back to your management team then?
A. Right. We bring it back to the school at large. It's called
the mission statement. This is for you. These are objectives
and strategies. This is what we are going to try to achieve.
We work on transition from eighth grade to ninth grade, what
can we do to make it easier for kids and how can they be more
successful? This is one of the questionnaires that we ask
incoming freshmen after they are here for a couple of months,
and then once again in May to see if they have -- if their
opinions have changed. We just recently run a survey
surveying the teachers asking them about their instructional
delivery styles, how many of them lecture, how many of them
use laser disks, how many use computer software, and how do
they like to use them, do they do any integrated work, and
that seems to be the buzz word for the next several years, is
integrated curriculum. I mean, there are two approaches and
in science you can use either a theme, a thematic core, or
else you can do something on change, so you can do evolution
and biology, you can do the change of the locks in geology, in
biology again, in biochemistry, you can do DNA, how does that
change? You try to relate all the sciences into that one
theme. And try to show kids the connection. Because the way
_________ industrialization is started, the way a kid learns
and the way we've learned is that you spend 50 minutes in a
room and it's science, and you go to another room and it's
English, and another room it's math, and kids, once they walk
out that door, they don't see the connection between the
areas, the disciplines. In high school, it's the sharpest,
you have the sharpest boundaries in high school. The high
school teachers tend to feel that their subject is the most
important and they are more content oriented than the lower
grades. And then it even gets more distilled as you go into
college where the professors think, you know, that theirs is
the only important course on the whole campus. Another way to
do it is to do integrated curriculum where you take an idea
and you use it in, for instance again, patterns, you could do
geometry, you could do patterns in biology, the leaves -- the
circle, the sphere is a very common shape, the hexagon is a
very common shape, and discuss why you use them in biological
organism. You could then do the history of patterns or
something, I'm just making this up as we talk here. So those
things -- and there's a lot of resistance from teachers, too.
First of all, they have been teaching so long that they don't
want change; they feel that they have been successful, why
should they change? People who approach retirement, and I
really can't blame them if they only have a year or two to go,
why, why change?
Q. What's the greatest influence on the teachers in this
situation where you're trying to make changes in curriculum?
Who's influencing the teachers? Is it the committee, the
superintendent, the board --
A. No, you mean who's --
Q. Trying to get it changed.
A. Okay. Yeah, I think that it is coming from the
superintendent. I think that people -- I would like to think
he has totally altruistic reasons, you know, but it is a
popular premise right now. Education is given to trends just
like any other kind of business and it's considered popular to
____________, and we're not doing a good job, and so how can
we do it differently? Well, it seems to make some sense that
you should do some integration, you know, no man is an island,
but then it also requires on the college level that teachers
be taught in a different manner. If you're going to get the
same old as far as instructional methods and you want to get
these professors who haven't been in a classroom in 25 years,
in a high school classroom, then you're going to get the same
old garbage in/garbage out. They really have to make major
changes on the college level to teach courses in a more
integrated fashion, to show students how things are related,
how they're connected, and to me that's the beauty of teaching
science along with society and showing people how it is that -
- I'm teaching about DNA and gene structure and chromosomes,
but there's a reason for it, there's a practical application,
you're going to have to vote on things in your lifetime as far
as referenda, I mean, they do in california all the time, you
know, should they allow them to create a different kind of
bacteria for experimentation? In california there was the ice
mice case where they wanted to introduce certain genetic
material into strawberry plants that made the strawberry plant
resistant to ice. It did something to the leaves so that ice
would not form and of course it would save millions of dollars
worth of strawberries, because they get the frost there and
the ice and the strawberries are killed, they are a very
delicate plant. It was brought to the people. Well, if you
don't understand that there are regulations -- when most
people think of scientists, especially genetic scientists,
they think of Dr. Frankenstein creating some kind of monster
and they don't realize that geneticists or scientists in
general are just as much human as they are and just as much
concerned about humanistic things, and we don't want to create
any kind of monstrous species any more than a person who is a
non-scientist. We understand the implications even more than
a lay person would. There are strict regulations about what
you can't fool around with and people think, well, you're
going to get a mad scientist who is going to create some sort
of weird thing, you know, someone who is not in the normal
realm of scientists, but you find that in any field. You
find somebody who was a lose cannon, who is crazy, and will do
anything. I'm sure that when the gas oven was created, they
didn't think that somebody would come along like Hitler and
put people into the oven. So it's not the scientist who
creates these monsters; it's human kind with all those
frailties and horrible characteristics, greed, and whatever,
you know, ultimate power. So I think by teaching in this
manner, by showing the students the connection, you empower
them because you give them more knowledge, more information,
the ability to synthesize and to come up with a knowledgeable
decision. And life is going to get more complicated and more
technological, and every day folks have a much clearer
understanding of what they're voting on and what they're
doing, to be able to just read a paper today. So I like to
think that it was the superintendent, with clear heart and
great mission here, we know that we can't force curricular
changes on people.
Q. Well, how do they resist?
A. Okay. How do they resist? They resist by not doing it.
There's no consequence. All you can do is have pockets of
people who are going to be change agents.
Q. So that might be colleagues?
A. Right. You have to find colleagues who will start little
pilot programs, get together in your department, go to other
departments, and say I want to teach the integrated curriculum
in this area, do you think you can do something? We're going
to do something like that on campus. KKK, who I think
you're going to speak to, she has had some training in
integrated thematic instruction with a person named Susan
Kovolik, and she is trying to start an integrated course with
probably math, perhaps science, perhaps English, perhaps
social studies. They haven't been chosen as yet, I don't
believe, but she might know. I'm sure she does. And this
summer they're going to sit down and try to work up a
curriculum and what I would like to do is do one theme, say
per nine weeks or per semester, do an integrated science theme
or integrated cross-curricular theme with my classes. And I
plan next year -- I'll probably be teaching anatomy and
physiology and I would like to work with the art teachers in
developing interdisciplinary curriculum there. I think it
really lends itself to that. There are some things in physics
and anatomy that -- how it works, muscles being levered, and
so there are little places where the teachers themselves, if
they're willing to, if they are of that mind, they can make
changes -- they can be change agents themselves.
Q. Can you think of a time where that creativity or innovation
has been thwarted by some outside influence?
A. Well --
Q. Principal, school board, parents?
A. Well, the school board is for it, because for some reason or
other they think this is going to be the panacea, this is
going to be the way out, making education better in the
(city name) School District. I think some integration is going
to be great, but again you have to be really a well-rounded
teacher, you know. Even if you're just going to be a thematic
core in the science project, you have to know -- nowadays, the
days of the liberal arts education is gone. I was a anatomy
major in college, biology and public health minor, however, I
had enough English to be an English minor, and social studies.
And that's not the case as much anymore. I also had
chemistry, physics, earth science. The teachers coming out,
and even many of them ______, inborn prejudice to the East,
that's why we're educated, and from what I can see, there's a
deep-seated tradition of education and knowledge in the East
that is lacking here because this is a very young state, the
48th state, and talking about schools like Harvard that have
been around for 300 or 400 years, ASU is a hundred years old,
a little bit more than that, you know. Stanford, of course,
has done a lot in a hundred years, it's a different philosophy
of education here in this state than it is in the East. Of
course, now, over the last couple of years, teachers must have
a master's degree within five years of their teaching. When
I was teaching in New York City, it was already on the books,
and that was over 20 years ago, you know, so there is -- here
there is like a lip service given to bettering your education,
increasing your education. So you're thwarted by institutions
and you're thwarted by your colleagues, in many cases,
whenever you rise to the top, there are also professional
jealousies. It's very hard to avoid that, and I wouldn't mind
it if -- I don't tell them what to do, my colleagues, and I'm
in a situation where my child is not a child, she's 21 years
old, so I don't have to do the same nurturing that people who
have younger families, the kind of things they have to do. I
can devote more time, but even when I had less time, I still
devoted more, but you play off one thing against the other.
There are certain sacrifices you make because you want to
excel and that's your inborn ambition, and other things in
your life may suffer for it. I'm not telling these teachers,
my colleagues, that they should do what I do. I just say, let
me do what I want to do. They don't even want to give you
recognition and let you go ahead and in some cases, I've been
thwarted personally from trying to achieve because they did
not want me to get any kind of recognition, whether the
students would benefit or not, that did not concern them. So
you find that -- and whenever you're a change agent, this is
what my superintendent told me, whenever you're a change agent
or you try to do something above the ordinary, you always have
people there who will criticize you and who try to pull you
down. So you have to make inroads with people of like minds
and start to have this small, exclusive ________ and hopefully
be an up-whelling of support and the others will either see
that there is good in what you're doing and want to catch on
to that bandwagon, or they will at least not sabotage what
you're trying to do. So there is -- and people just don't
like change. When I moved over here, and this was not my
desire, okay? Again, because a principal exercised his
authority and got me moved over here, I mean, manipulated
numbers, I'll tell you that, and when I moved over here, it
was a real hard place to break into, and it still is for a lot
of people that come over here from other schools, a difficult
place to be. People are real set in their ways, it has a very
mature faculty, and they just don't want to change; they've
been doing things like this -- and they don't want anybody to
discover what kind of job they're doing in the classroom. Did
you see the movie ------- we have classes like that. But for
the most part, I think teachers really try to do a good job
but even the ones that aren't affected, will tell you that
they're doing a good job. And they may be doing the best they
can, but kids have changed. When I moved over here, the funny
thing is that they told me that change was good and the person
that told me this, I said, well, you've been in this school 17
or 18 years, how would you know how change is? You don't want
to change. So lots of times the people who tell you that
change is good are the ones that never had to go through any
kind of change themselves, and I don't think that change is
necessarily good if it is disruptive and makes you unhappy.
But, you know, it's been good for me in the sense that there
are some positives because it has made me a stronger person
and more flexible, versatile person. I can teach anything in
the sciences, except maybe for physics, and even there I was
offered a physics job, and -- but I don't feel I would do that
well, so it's slowly changing. However, there are forces out
there that are trying to keep you down, and that being to my
mind, administrators, supervisors, parents, and teachers
themselves. This site-base shared decision-making, it's kind
of what's happened to the Russian country, I mean the country
we used to call Russia, once these people have tasted the
freedom, they don't want to go back to what it was, and now
once we have shared decision-making in the district, who wants
to go back to that stuff? One of the reasons that I'm kind of
a ________ is because, and I've seen this a lot of places
against women, strong women, if you're outspoken -- like it's
really rampant in this school district and in the state, if
you're -- I mean, I've paid my dues, I've proved myself, and
yet there are people that believe that I am too assertive and
all I do is -- my former principal wanted to know why -- he
would make a statement, this is how we're going to do it --
and all I would say, and I know that you can't come across as
some kind of witch like Leona Helmsley, so, believe me, you
tone yourself down and you say, you know, in a differential
manner, how did you reach that conclusion? Or what's your
rationale for that? I mean, that's how I ask questions. I
want to know. That's my training, I'm a science person. They
don't want to tell you. It's like the little button, you do
it because I'm the Mom, or do it because I'm the dad, you
know. I'm not a child, and maybe it's okey -- you can't even
talk to teenagers like that, you know, so that's how the
former principal was.
Q. Your time is up. Would you mind if I called you and tried to
set up another time to talk to you.
A. Sure, because I really -- I feel strongly about this. See,
men are allowed to -- SSS is a primary example. They're
always being cited for being good ol' boys and not having
enough women on their staffs, you know, faculty, and they had
a winner in this TTT, pulitzer prize poet, and they
didn't even want to hire her, the former chairman of the
department, according to the paper, well, she had so-so
qualifications, and then after she won a pulitzer prize, I
don't blame her, you know, she went to a better situation.
I'll bet if you would look at the percentage of women that are
full professors at any of the state universities, it's
probably inconsequential. And here in this district, they
have them in all the positions where they want someone to work
well, okay? You have in the upper echelon, assistant
superintendents, we have one out of -- we have -- our
superintendent is male, and our two assistant superintendents,
two of them are male, one is a female, and before Dr. PPP,
they were all male. You look at all the high schools, all the
principals are male, okay. You look at the junior highs,
mostly males. And the elementary, they're even coming in
there. We used to be the bastion of females, right? A lot of
them are now, maybe not the majority, but a rising minority
are male. And I'm not saying that it should be -- it
shouldn't be male/female, it should be the best one for the
job, but they all look like clones of each other with the
straight hair, hair parted on the side, and it's -- they need
-- and they're not necessarily do a poor job, but I'm sure
there are women out there who could do just as good a job.
Now you will find the women in the position of assistant
principal, okay, or they give the women the tough schools, so-
called tough schools to clean up. The woman who has gotten
this far, it has been my experience, then you know they're
twice as good as the men. I hate to say that but it has been
my experience, and maybe there are other examples that would
go the other way and maybe I'm just totally prejudice this
way, but the reason I'm over here is because I would not be a
good ol' boy and I would not be a yes person. I ask questions
and I want answers. And if a man asks the same question, he
would be considered to be on the ball and really with it and
knowledgeable, and you find that really big time here. I
would like to talk to you if you have any questions.
Q. Could I call you at home?
A. Sure. And maybe you had a lot of questions and I've been
talking all the time.
Q. No, that's great.