Protecting Bad Administrators: A Chronic Problem Which Deserves a Solution

I am going to circle back to a common theme in this blog. Why are many public school systems protecting bad administrators when they 100% KNOW that the administrator has behaved in an unprofessional, ineffective, and/or inappropriate manner?

I mean the stories I hear are shocking. They are bad enough that I can’t even discuss them in print. Those stories are unfortunately not confined to one geographical region. The stories I hear range from mistreating staff, to mistreating students, and/or the inability to run a school building efficiently. I have worked for three administrators who were awful, and everybody knew it – everybody. A common characteristic of all three was very cleverly disguised dishonesty. It is often manipulative in its iteration and devastating to staff moral.

It is our job as a community to demand that our local school systems act when bad administrators reveal themselves. Of the three terrible administrators that I worked for(I also worked also for many great ones!), two have been promoted. And that is a story which I hear far too often. Instead of pushing bad administrators out of the profession, they hang around in our profession waiting for a job with better pay. I understand that it isn’t easy firing someone, but the best school systems will jettison bad employees. The havoc which bad administrators cause is measured in the loss of quality building cultures, the loss of quality staff, the loss of integrity by a system which refuses to act. The refusal to dismiss bad admin often results in people who are harmed in some form or another.

I have often found that many bad administrators have very narcissistic tendencies. They know who to impress and they know how to impress those powerful players. But deep down, they don’t care who they hurt in a school building to achieve their career goals. That philosophy might be OK on Wall Street, but it isn’t OK in a building full of impressionable young students.

So, I want us to think about the cost of doing nothing. The problem won’t go away by retaining a bad administrator and reassigning them. You are just going to get another iteration of the same problem on down the line. More people will be hurt. More damage to culture will be done.

A tiger doesn’t change their stripes. Bad admins don’t become good ones over time. Sometimes a pink slip is the best answer. Sometimes the most constructive words for a bad administrator are, “You’re fired.” This solution provides an avenue for the system to maintain integrity, for building culture to heal, and for the learning process to be at its best.