industry, replete with command-and-control management from top to
bottom.
Hugo Mendoza, the man selected to
replace Alonzo, was considered a rising
star in the district. Most of the teachers
liked him and seemed drawn to his
magnetic personality. One teacher said,
“He’s a hands-on person. He’s a motivational speaker, and he runs our meetings.” It became increasingly clear that
the new principal, despite his disavowal
of top-down leadership, was systematically eroding the teachers’ authority.
One teacher who liked the principal and
who praised his political skill added,
“He appears to be democratic, but he
gets input from the teachers to make his
decisions seem legitimate, to lessen the
opposition.”
According to some teachers, the
district office gave the new principal a
lot of power, which he used to reward
those who supported him and punish
those who did not. Said one teacher,
“No one will cross him. The teachers are
intimidated. As they feel more powerless, they stop caring. They stop
thinking about the kids and pay more
attention to their own positions.”
Ironically, some of the teachers said
they liked the way the new principal
relieved them of the work they had been
doing under Alonzo. Explained one
teacher,
When Harriett was principal, my job was
a lot harder, but Mr. Mendoza has taken a
lot of pressure off us. We’re not up front
running the meetings anymore and we
have less responsibility, but when you’re
teaching six or seven periods a day, it’s a
lot to do.
By summer 2007, a few teachers saw
that the new principal’s charismatic
personality and his take-charge style
had begun to erode the teachers’
decision-making power. “He’s divided
the teachers and seized control,” one
teacher said. “The effect has been to
make the teachers docile.” Just as the
changes that liberated the school in
2003 came quietly, as though there had
been a “secret takeover,” the new
administrative control was taking root
without much notice. Each step the new
principal took was in the direction of
replacing the teachers’ leadership with
his own.
On the Verge of Something Great
The window for innovation at Ballona
has now been shut. The days of double-digit improvements are over. In
2007–08, the school failed to meet even
a modest target of an 8 percent increase
in its scores in all of its subgroups.
Many teachers are scared of the principal. According to some teachers, 35 of
their colleagues have filed complaints
with the union, many of them for the
unprofessional way the principal treats
the staff.
By 2009, teachers who had been
members of the leadership team now
acknowledge that they’ve lost something
important. One said, “All of the decisions are being made by Mendoza’s
cabinet that’s dominated by administrators.” Another teacher added,
No one ever asks us about new reforms
like small learning communities. [It’s]
“Get on board or else go find another
job.” The tools we learned—running
meetings, walk-throughs, and critical
friends—they’re just sitting over there on
the side not being used.
Another indicator of the teachers’
diminished leadership role is how the
school collects and uses data. “We used
to survey the entire staff and discuss the
results publicly to make sure the school
was on track,” noted one teacher. “But
now the administration does the
research, and they discuss it privately.
We get to see what they want us to see.”
One veteran teacher summed up the
situation:
What most administrators don’t understand is the more leaders a campus has,
the better things are. Each of us believed
that every one of our kids could succeed.
The school was on its way to ingraining
this idea. Imagine how it could have been
if we’d had another six or seven years to
make it really solid. We were on the verge
of something great.
Shared Leadership
Collaborative models of leadership seem
to be everywhere but in schools, from
established industrial firms like BMW to
a host of new companies like MySpace
and the Human Genome Project. All
these organizations are moving away
from hierarchical control (Tapscott &
Williams, 2006), distributing leadership
throughout their organizations and
allowing teams to manage themselves,
develop authority, and have some
control over their working conditions.
However, in the minds of many of
today’s top education administrators,
exerting control over others is still justified as a way of keeping order and discipline—because they are ultimately held
accountable. But one has only to
witness the expensive buyouts of superintendents’ contracts to realize that the
current system also rewards failure.
Is there another way? Yes. According
to a story that actor and activist Harry
Belafonte told during an interview on
PBS (Kendall, 2008), when labor leader
A. Philip Randolph first met Franklin
Delano Roosevelt, the president asked
what he could do to improve conditions
for blacks. After Randolph gave an
eloquent answer, Roosevelt agreed with
