Wanted: Big-City School Superintendents
About a dozen cities are jockeying to woo an ever-shrinking pool of qualified candidates for an increasingly demanding job. By Lauren Camera Education ReporterApril 4, 2018, at 11:59 a.m. https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-04-04/big-cities-struggle-to-fill-school-superintendent-positions
The annual school superintendent hunting season is open, and as usual, about a dozen cities are jockeying to woo an ever-shrinking pool of qualified candidates for a demanding job that requires one part managerial skills, one part political savvy and one part education-policy acumen for a tenure that, on average, lasts barely more than three years.
To be sure, big-city school superintendents are paid handsomely. In 2014, the salaries of superintendents at cities that are part of the Council for the Great City Schools ranged from $99,000 to $339,000, in addition to platinum health care, pensions, life insurance and other related benefits. Most superintendents of the biggest school districts clear $300,000 easily, with the job of helming New York City schools drawing upward of $500,000.
“Anybody who gets into this knows full well that the demands are extremely high,” Casserly says. “The context in which you do this job now is probably more difficult now than it’s ever been. It does give some people pause.”
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more on school leaders in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=school+leaders
‘Collaboration’ Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, According to Science
Far from being a productivity panacea, a collaborative culture will drive your top performers away.
My note: what about the quest for consensus? A former library director claimed as foremost goal to improve the work of the librarians – consensus. To the point, when I had to write the library director: consensus in this library means the codification of mediocrity.
A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now confirmed that a collaborative work environment can make top performers–the innovators and hard-workers–feel miserable and socially isolated.
The problem is that rather than seeing a top performer as a role models, mediocre employees tend to see them as threats, either to their own position in the company or to their own feelings of self-worth.
Rather than improving their own performance, mediocre employees socially isolate top performers, spread nasty rumors about them, and either sabotage, or attempt to steal credit for, the top performers’ work. As the study put it: “Cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers.”
open-plan offices, with all their interruptions, distractions, and noise pollution, are productivity sinkholes. My note: and if these sinkholes are avoided, the PSEUDO-democracy of faculty meetings can assure the ostracizing of those who think differently and assert the rule of meritocracy in a “democratic” way.
This is not to say that teamwork is a bad thing, per se. Indeed, most complex projects require a team to successfully complete. For teams to be effective, though, they need leaders who can swiftly squelch any attempt to isolate or denigrate a top performer.
https://www.insidehighered.com/system/files/media/2018_Presidents_Survey_Final.pdf
Presidents believe the business models for elite private colleges, elite private liberal arts colleges and public
flagship universities are viable over the next 10 years. They are less likely to think the business model for
community colleges is viable, and relatively few think for-profit institutions and other private nonprofit
institutions have viable business models.
• Nearly all presidents believe that additional colleges will merge or close this year, with 30 percent predicting that
between one and five colleges will close, 40 percent between 6 and 10, and 29 percent more than 10.
• Thirteen percent of presidents say they could see their own college closing or merging in the next five years.
That is higher than the 9 percent of chief business officers who answered that way in an Inside Higher Ed survey
last summer.
Are you leading or managing? Are you being led or managed? Which do you prefer?
Joe Keshmiri | Mar 20, 2018
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-leading-managing-being-led-manged-which-do-prefer-joe-keshmiri
LEADERSHIP IS…
the process of influencing others to understand and agree what needs to be done and how it can be done effectively, and
the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish the shared objectives
LEADERS ARE…
People who carry out these processes
or, people in positions of authority in societies/organizations
Yukl 2010
The Difference between Leaders and Managers:
- Both personalities were thought to produce a different sense of self that would guide conduct and attitudes.
- Managers are seen as regulators and perpetuators of the existing institutions, identifying with them.
- Leaders were viewed as individuals who did not depend on membership for identity, working for an organization but never belonging to them.
- This distinction offered a theoretical basis for understanding why leaders seek opportunities for change
(Mintzberg, and Kotter, et al 1998)
- Leader seek change and innovation
- Leaders do not depend on others or institutions for identity
- Leaders work for the organization but do not belong to them
- Managers and leaders are different
- Leaders are active, not reactive, they exert an influence to alter moods, evoke images and expectations
- Managers are more rational, more detached, more concerned with process and tactics than with substance.
(Zaleznik 1977)
Management – ‘to bring about, to accomplish, to have charge of or responsibility for, to conduct’.
Leadership –’influencing, guiding in direction, course, action, opinion’.
Bennis and Nanus (1985):
Leadership
- Creates change
- Works through relationships with people
- Establishing direction
- Aligning people
- Motivating and inspiring
Kotter 1990
Management is:
- Planning and budgeting
- Organizing and staffing
- Controlling and problem solving
Kotter 1990
The real challenge is:
To combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other
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more on leadership in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=leadership
http://www.raulpacheco.org/2016/06/how-to-do-a-literature-review-citation-tracing-concept-saturation-and-results-mind-mapping/
- engage in citation tracing: you will need to find the key references across the literature for your particular project
- map whether your literature review has reached concept saturation: have you exhausted the field for the specific topic you are working on
- need to lay out how different citations, bodies of work and key concepts relate to each other
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more on digital literacy for EDAD in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy+edad
more on proofreading and writing in this IMS lbog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proofreading+writing
- affect
- analyze
- apply
- argue
- assess
- cite
- claim
- compare
- consider
- context
- critique
- demonstrate
- determine
- differentiate
- discuss
- distinguish
- effect
- evaluate
- explore
- identify
- illustrate
- infer
- interpret
- oppose
- organize
- paraphrase
- process
- recall
- refer
- strategy
- summarize
- symbolize
- theme
- valid
- vary
- verify
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More on academic writing in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proofreading
The top 5 cybersecurity threats for schools
BY EARL D. LAING November 29th, 2017
1. Link Security
From ransomware to phishing and other types of security breaches, direct contact is the number one way that you can create a vulnerability in your system. Those who commit these online crimes are finding smarter and sneakier ways to infiltrate your data every day. Sometimes the attack can even come as an email from a legitimate sender, or appear to be a perfectly normal message on social media. The goal is usually to get you to click on a link.
Solution: Make sure the security preferences for your email account(s) are set up to filter spamming, phishing and executable files that aren’t recognized.
2. Unknown Devices
Solution: Your IT system should include a solution that tracks all devices, including those not owned by your school, that enter the network.
3. Out of Date Technology
Contrary to popular misconception, user interaction isn’t always required for a cyber attack to be launched. The WannaCry attack targeted hundreds of computers all with the same security vulnerability on their Windows operating systems.
Solution: Again, an IT solution that tracks all devices is important, but one that can also check on software upgrades and block access to certain apps is ideal.
4. User Error
A data breach in Florida is just one example of the chaos user error can provoke. This issue didn’t begin with hackers at all. It began with carelessness that caused sensitive information to become public.
User error occurs regularly, and a common root of this is failing to restrict access to files or certain sites that may be compromised.
Solution: Restrict user access to sensitive documents only to those who absolutely need them, and make sure that your site architecture is set up to require a secure login for access. You may also want to create a white list of safe sites and applications and block the rest.
5. No Backup
As disheartening as it sounds, even when you take all the necessary precautions to protect your vital information, data breaches can still occur. When an attack happens, it’s often a major blow to productivity to try and get all the information back into a secure place. Worse, vital work can be lost for good.
Solution: Install a backup system on each school device that sends data to a remote server throughout the day (not just at night) to help make sure nothing is lost.
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more on cybersecurrity in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cybersecurity
Twitter chats can boost student voice, enhance digital citizenship
Roger Riddell Dec. 19, 2017
https://www.educationdive.com/news/twitter-chats-can-boost-student-voice-enhance-digital-citizenship/513340/
My note:
This is another example of blanket statements aimed to bank on buzzwords and fashionable tendencies. Indeed, use of social media is an imperative skill for any educational leader, since it provides a modern venue to communicate with the rest of the stakeholders in the educational process: parents, students etc.
However, the process of social media use in education is rather more complex as presented in this article. e.g.:
- why Twitter? why is Twitter chosen by the author as the social media platform, considering that Snapchat is the social media app by choice of teenagers?
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2018/01/06/snapchat-leading-social-media-app/
- why the hashtag use is the one and only altmetric consideration for deep data analysis? The author suggests taking “advantage of an analytic tool to measure effectiveness and participation,” but there is no specific recommendation and the choice of the analytical tool as well as the process of analysis is a science on its own
- how educators, as suggested by the author, “want to guide students on comment intensity and type while keeping them on topic”? Indeed, an educator abiding by constructivism will facilitate and guide, yet there is a fine boundary between facilitating and dominating the conversation with “guidance.”
The most useless suggestion in the article:
“For administrators, Twitter chats also provide an opportunity to gain student and parent perspectives while giving them more voice in what’s going on within a school or district.”
Are administrators willing to yield that power to their constituency? What does the current research on educational leaders’s attitude reveal regarding their willingness to engage in such open (and difficult to control) discourse? How is such attitude to be changed: this is missing in this article.
What is your approach to the institutional use of social media at your school?
