Who wouldn't want this job?
Everyone in the education world is talking about the trouble filling teaching positions. States including Idaho and Arizona have been so challenged that to solve the problem they’ve changed the definition of teacher to “any person with a pulse and a bit of college under their belt.” Most states considered filling teacher positions a full-blown crisis even before the pandemic and The Great Resignation hit.
What we haven’t heard about is trouble finding people to fill positions in school administration.
Anecdotally, some areas report having slimmer pickings for openings that occur. At the moment, actual reported stories of such gaps are few and very local.
But public school administrators generally come from the ranks of classroom teachers, and since those ranks have been thinning, the prospects for future administrators may be a problem as well.
Just as future teachers come from the ranks of students who have twelve years to observe the job, administrator candidates have years to watch the job through the work of their own building administrators. And just as the last few years have diminished the attractiveness of teaching, administrative positions have also suffered. The only major difference is that, unlike teaching, the salaries for administrators in some districts are attractive enough to draw people to the job for all the wrong reason.
After entering the era of high stakes testing, one of my former principals described the job as having “all the responsibility with none of the power.” They have to manage staff and students. They’re responsible for keeping tests scores up. They have had to navigate the pandemic, and they must increasingly deal with a public angry over “critical race theory,” LGBTQ issues, and the books in the school library.
School and district leadership matters. Principals and superintendents on the ground determine what kins of impact state and federal policy will have on classroom teachers. School leadership determines, implicitly or explicitly, what the values of the school will be. It sets a tone for the school culture. It is often the difference between teachers who go and teachers who stay.
The “teacher shortage” developed slowly over time, and policy makers have been slow to react. A failure to recruit and retain top talent for administrative positions will have a debilitating effect on schools. That crisis may be just over the horizon (some teachers suffering under poor administrators will tell you it’s already here), but if nobody is paying attention, it will catch states flatfooted in the face of one more big challenge.
