THE appointment of individuals into principal positions to these institutions has turned into an endeavour that calls for extra care. It seems only those ready to play second fiddle to unnecessary interference by unnecessary organisations like NANSO and administrators stand a better chance for appointment to such positions. Administrators are on the ready to swarm these underperforming institutions using “poor results” as the pretext of carrying out these undue meddling activities.
The situation is never made better by the fact that our nation is yet to dream about the advent of ‘School Leadership Colleges’. Principals are never taken through careful training in terms of how leadership activities should be carried out to cater for the leadership needs of teachers and learners.
The unnecessary pressure on teachers is the consequence of school leadership attempting to please administrators despite the difficult circumstances that define their working environment. The needs of their teachers have become subservient to those of administrators and this has resulted in lack of trust between teachers and the leadership of their schools.
Most principals in these poor schools lack basic ‘people skills’, an essential recipe for managing fellow human beings in modern times. A plethora of modern leadership scholarship advocates for the demonstration of power through people, as opposed to demonstrating power over people. If one pays attention to phone-in programmes, via NBC radio stations, and pursue the SMS text messages via the newspaper, it would be deduced that principals expose teachers to bizarre tactics.
It is devastating to mention that the pressure to amuse directors, inspectors, education officers and subject advisers has seen principals engage Machiavellian tactics to elicit commitment from teachers. They die to demonstrate to their bosses that they are doing ‘something’. It is their bosses they aspire to please other than the team of teachers under their leadership. They have turned into ‘spies’, other than supervisors, of the teaching staff.
Schools are turning into ruthless environments that leave zero room for error. They do not give an opportunity to teachers to learn from their mistakes and better their future prospects as teachers. School inspectors are just ‘on call’ ready to swoop on these teachers and reduce them to zero over issues that hardly call for external attention. Their school visits have reached provocative intensity and are turning into unnecessary interference.
The salary re-grading of 2012 turned school administrators in general and subject advisers in particular, into principals’ watchdogs. They are on sentinel duty ready to swoop on schools and reprimand teachers and principals over issues that call for lesser external meddling. Calls are quickly made to school inspectors by principals and individual teachers are mostly the theme of discussion. Conspiracy has become a new leadership style cherished and employed by both principals and administrators.
Mistakes made by teachers are never considered opportunities for staff development and empowerment. They are rather regarded as signs of weakness that should be met with tongue-lashing censure and demeaning chitchat or gossip. Teachers are forever advised to do ‘the right thing’ as opposed to doing ‘what is right’. Procedures are followed to the ‘dot’ and these have become more important than those they were devised to serve. Teachers have been turned into ‘procedure worshipers’ and therefore cannot reason outside the box. One has to religiously follow procedures even if that would not suit a given context. It is actually turning into some form of military initiation. There is just zero room left for creativity and innovation in the underachieving schools.
By Silume Simataa