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Chapter 9 The k–12 school district team If quality education is the goal of a school district, then the teacher-student classroom relationship necessarily must be at the center of all educational activity in the schools. We assert this main anchoring education principle not to take the “side” of teachers, as some top administrators may incorrectly interpret our effort, but to begin to show how the carefully orchestrated efforts of a unified school team can be made to work to benefit students, considerably improving the standing of both teachers and administrators in communities across the United States. Again, teachers need to be seen and treated as the most important employees in a school district, not because administrators and other education stakeholders are less important, but simply because schools are judged on the quality of the education that their students achieve. For the quality of the education delivered is finally always based on the nature of the effort and the amount of time that teachers are provided to devote to the learning that their students absorb. Administrators, school board members, and state education agencies lead and are held accountable for how school systems actually function, but it is the teachers who daily work in the classrooms delivering education to students, making all of the educators above them either look good and professional or not. The issue is not that people ought to choose to side either with teachers or the administration or with other school stakeholders, as these areas of responsibility have been traditionally de- fined. Rather, every American needs to know that if quality education to the young is to be dispensed, learning can only happen in the classrooms where teachers directly interface with the students on a daily or frequent basis. For this fundamental reason, everyone else mainly serves to facilitate , to encourage, and to promote the interactive relationship that good and great teachers work to develop with their students. If a child’s mind is engaged by a teacher’s approach to the material, the k–12 school district team 113 learning occurs. True learning, indeed, should be an enjoyable, fun experience ; and gradually discovering how things work or how they can work better is central to a quality education. The nature of the interaction between the teacher and the student is the point of contact where learning can occur, and a whole school district either succeeds or fails as a result of the efforts and the quality of the teachers’ contact with students . Since administrators lead and are charged with supervising and evaluating teachers, all school activities very clearly ought to function smoothly and well. For this reason, keeping the learning activities of the teacher-student relationship at the center of the educational enterprise is first and foremost. Everything else in the infrastructure of a school system needs to be designed to support teachers and students. Earlier we used the metaphor of a baseball team. We said that the central activity in a baseball game is the agreement that goes on between the pitcher and the catcher. The game does not begin until the batter is standing in the batter’s box and the pitcher hurls the ball. At this point, everybody else on the field, including the coaches and the owners as well as the other team members in the dugout, sit and watch, waiting to see if all of those practice sessions and their strategies work well enough together to win the game. Like pitchers, teachers deliver instruction or they do not. Their responsibility and goal is to educate the youngsters in their care, but everyone else has to help them accomplish this purpose. Many people recognize this objective, but some professional education team members are not sufficiently attuned to their part in helping teachers and not the other way around; that is, teachers are not in the classroom to help administrators or the board of education or education state agencies. Education systems, as they currently exist in too many places, are not always successful in delivering the material that needs to be conveyed to students because even though the official rhetoric is to serve the student, functionally that is not the main goal. In such schools, too many other activities interfere with this essential, interactive task. Often, teaching is only one of the duties that teachers are required to do, along with supervising the lunch hour, helping to load students on and off buses, and watching the halls for...

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