cmolt:

michelleannie:

Administrators are the highest paid people in education and the sole interest of most of them is keeping their huge salary.

As abcd1234pdq stated, there are bad administrators and good administrators just as there are bad teachers and good teachers. Your statement regarding the motives of "most" administrators could just as anecdotally be applied to educators, i.e., the sole interest of most of them is protecting their insoluble tenure.

School administration is a rare phenomenon, in that a large number of administrators are former educators. Given that, the unseen facets and difficulties that face an administrator are typically misunderstood and minimized by angry and ill-affected educators. The reverse is not true; administrators are by and large aware and understanding of the issues faced by educators in the field. Instead of castigating them as a selfish "other", it is imperative that educators truly learn the difference between a bad administrator and a good administrator stuck in a difficult situation making the hard decisions that are hidden from those for whom they are responsible.

I want to take that on. The system by which teachers self-select themselves to be school administrators favors those who

1. Do not love teaching, and specifically would rather be in an office than in a classroom.

2. Are ambitious and seek to get out of the classroom as soon as possible, so that they can rise to higher district level positions as soon as possible.

3. Are power mad

Beyond this point, educational administrators are asked to do a lot of things that a more suited for the private business world, but because relative to private business, teaching is a terrible paying job, and because adminstrators must all be educators prior you are virtually guaranteed to get:

a. Someone who, relative to her business peers with the same level of responsibility has the least amount of business accumen.

b. Shows extremely little ability as a personnel manager.

c. Makes agreements with vendors on the worst possible terms.

d. Is susceptiable to cretinous business fads dressed up with edu-speak, and prone to subject the faculty to this nonsense.

e. Is jealous of the ability of non-educators to effectively manage a business organization and as a result will bring in non-educators to give totally irrelevant motivational talks to the faculty.

Do all adminstrators fit this description? Obviously, no. But the system as designed certaintly encourages this set of character traits and makes it actually quite difficult for those adminstrators, to the extent that they do go against this cast. To function properly. Towards that end, want to meet someone even more bitter than someone who left teaching? Find someone who quits as a principal for a reason other than scandal.