Let’s see what the most loved “chicks” om the internet are up to these days. Many are sitting at their keyboards plotting world domination, but you already knew that. Shirt stuff taken from here
Beth C. has some “uplifting” words for those …

:-)

(Yes, I do know that there are a few ed profs that are decent and intelligent and who actually know what it means to be teachers–just far too few. And yes, there are a few people in ed bureaucracies who are also decent people genuinely dedicated to education. Fewer still who have the mental horsepower, experience in the real world of teaching and sheer guts to do real good. Heck, there are even a couple–somewhere: one of the two I know is retired–of good pubscholl administrators. It’s not all negative news. And there are tons of teachers laboring valiently against the fall of night as it were… but they are all swimming upstream. *sigh*)

“Why can’t I just SHOW how my lesson is guided by our county and state standards, and how the lesson was planned based on various assessments and student needs?”

1.) CYA for the admin. At heart, pubschool administrators know they are the least useful (often the most obstructive) and usually the least intelligent people in the school… counting the janitors and the cooks. THEY certainly can’t answer those questions, and they know (also in their tiny lil hearts) that the questions are simply a way for them to play CYA when it comes time to justify their own existences.

2.) Control. The more useless crap the admins can give the teachers, the more they can manage their real jobs: creating conditions where they can PROVE they meet the state standards, but continuing to place enough roadblocks between the tracher and actually teaching to be able to claim that they simply need more turf urm, money and teachers to get the job done right.

3.) At last, admins are of the genus homo bureaucratus. This means that two things obtain:

a.) Pournelle’s Iron law of Bureaucracy:

…in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

b.) Recall a sub-point of number 1: pubschool admins are arguably the least intelligent people in the public schools (just ask to compare your GRE scores, for example, with that of any pubschool admin). And, as Shaw observed (the centurion in Antony and Cleopatra), “When a stupid man does something he knows is wrong, he always claims it is his duty.” Administrators are only doing their duty when they require time-wasting, b.s. tasks from teachers.

These factors, among many others, work to assure that you will ALWAYS be required to do any number of meaningless, time and energy wasting tasks… as long as remote management of schools by bureaucraps and their minions–the local administrators–continues to micromanage classrooms.

But, hey! Who am I to comment? I left that scene a buncha years ago… Still love to teach, just refuse to suffer fools gladly.