Sacrifice: The Unfortunate Persistence of Monastic Tradition in Public Education

During my first year as principal, 1986-87, an unmarried teacher I’ll call Morgan came to my office and told me, “I’m pregnant. On purpose. I’m due in April. I’m not getting married.”

When this happened in the 1980s, public schools were still sorting out the collision between individual employee rights and traditional social values. Morgan gave birth to her child less than two decades after Tucson began allowing married teachers to stay in their classrooms once the pregnancy was obvious.

Before public schools existed, teachers often came from monasteries and convents, where they were bound by vows of poverty and chastity. As schools have developed into secular institutions and the profession has overflowed the bounds of the religious orders, I wonder if an expectation of personal sacrifice continues to undermine not only teachers' salaries but also their status as professionals.

 Once I became a principal, I found that it was part of my job to help maintain the illusion of the chaste and bland teacher. Even as teacher celibacy stereotypes have faded, we as a nation may not have stopped regarding the call to teaching as an implicit commitment to living in worthy poverty, some willingness to occupy a subordinate and humble role.

Ironically, today’s teachers must do far more parenting in their classrooms than previous generations of educators—yet another aspect of the work inside the sacrifice paradigm but outside the job description. Imagine an accountant or a book editor or an architect, both high-intensity professionals, having to work with all their clients together in one room, six hours at a stretch, five days a week. 

Does the tradition of teacher as sacrificial instrument infect public policy and educational decision-making in America? In all the discussion of teacher compensation, does the abstemious monk or the virtuous nun hover in the background, the images against which today’s teachers are judged? I’m not sure we are beyond that yet.

How Does Life Become a Book?

One day in January of 2001, a friend of a friend passed my name along to an editor at USA Today. This editor asked me to write a one-thousand word Day in the Life piece to go along with a story they were going to publish about the work of school principals. Eager to expose the inner workings of a job that just kept on getting harder, I agreed.

Within a few weeks, I realized that a thousand words wouldn't even come close to showing what actually happened in a typical day, or even an easy day.That short a format wouldn't have allowed me to summarize or list the hundred conversations, the hundreds of people, the sounds, smells, mishaps, surprises, small and large victories, that never stop happening in a public elementary school. 

By the time I started writing what turned into my memoir Principal: A Personal History, I had put in fifteen years as leader of first one elementary school, and then another, in Tucson, my hometown. I had grown puzzled and frustrated by how much more difficult my job had gotten over that time. You might expect that it would be a simple matter of accumulating experience and then applying the wisdom gained as each new school year came around.

I believe that school leadership is crucial to the success of our democracy, and that if we don't get this sorted out pretty soon, our troubles will grow. My book, Principal, does not provide the answers, but provides for the first time in the current era an inside look at what happens in schools from the perspective of the school leader. The answers to the questions raised, I believe, need to come from informed conversation, one that I hope to start. 

In future posts, I'll include some excerpts, some thoughts about what's not in the book, the occasional rant or thoughtful reflection about current issues, and updates on the process and progress of publication.

Since this is my first experience blogging, I hope you will bear with me as I figure it all out!

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