I have just had an interesting offline discussion prompted by my reflections in "Failing up". The former teacher does not want to go public, but has said I can tell his story. Joe was a Head of Department in a large school, responsible for a department with eleven other teachers, and all Language Arts programs for almost 1000 students. He also had a Principal who had failed up.
The Principal's appointment was a mystery. Jim's qualifying experience was apparently as a two-year Head of Department in a department of two, in a low-ranking school which offered no advanced courses.
Jim was widely disliked, mocked, even despised by teachers. He was mocked at Heads of Department meetings, and openly challenged. He was repeatedly caught out in exaggerations and mistruths. Joe also had his issues with Jim.
In Joe's second year, he was asked by Jim for annual evaluations about two months before they were due. Joe explained he did not have them, although he did have his working notes which he would later use for the evaluations. Jim replied that he was to have a meeting with Steve momentarily and wanted some background.
Steve was a terrible teacher. He lacked subject knowledge, teaching abilities, control, lacked staff and student relationships, did not contribute outside the classroom etc. It appears that Steve is a textbook example of what can go wrong with "alternative certification" programs. Joe and Jim had previously discussed Steve and had idenified him for "non-renewal" and Jim had asked Joe specifically to document failings to support this action.
Joe told Jim he could share his working notes on Steve with Jim, but that they were strictly confidential and that Jim must not show them to Steve. They were not in Steve's permanent file, and were in draft form etc. Jim gave his word not to share them.
Joe went off to his class or meeting or whatever it was. After school that day, he went into the faculty lounge to check his pigeonhole (!). Conversation stopped, the mood went dark, he felt like he had entered a freezer. This was new, Joe had previously been popular. Now he sensed he was not.
The next day, Joe was blanked by colleague after colleague. His "good mornings" were ignored. Steve was huddled in a corner with three or four other members of the department.
At the weekly departmental meeting that afternoon, Steve and three other colleagues launched an attack on Joe. After several minutes of vitriol, Steve revealed that Jim had shared Joe's confidential notes and not only had she shared them, he had given them to Steve to read. Steve was incensed that he was being evaluated, that he was being so badly evaluated, and that evidence was being collated.
His three colleagues were similarly irate. One was similarly weak and so presumably could see his future reflected in Steve's situation; the other two were new to the profession and had not yet understood the role of a Head of Department in a teacher's evaluation.
The next two months were unpleasant and any semblance of teamwork, collaboration and positivity was gone.
Joe made a formal written complaint to the Board Chair under the school's written grievance procedures, written also according to federal guidelines on whistleblowing. The Board Chair acknowledged it verbally, but it was "too late" for the next meeting's agenda. However he did tell the Jim of the complaint.
Meanwhile, Joe's contract was renewed with a corresponding salary bump by letter from the Board. (Leadership contracts were handled separately and on a different timeframe from teacher contracts.) Two or three weeks later, Jim called Joe in and gave him a letter ending his employment "at will" with a month's salary as recognition of his good work.
So Joe was let go, clearly because of his complaint although an attorney told him that this would be difficult to prove and expensive to litigate, particulaly in an at will state. He left teaching, founded a million-dollar company, employed 24 staff and has close to 0% staff and customer complaints and 0% staff turnover. I suspect he would have been an excellent principal, the kind we lack.
Joe tells me this experience still rankles, 20 years later. Two things made it worse. Firstly, the Board Chair told his secretary two weeks after Joe's firing that he had made a mistake by not acting immediately on the written complaint and that the wrong person had left the school. Secondly, Jim was fired the next year, and given that he was principal he was probably told months earlier, and immediately found a job as a professor in an out-of-state university's college of education. Steve left the school and teaching at the end of the year to become a full-time writer.
Not only had Jim failed up twice, he was now ensuring his legacy of unprofessionalism and failure would be continued. Bad things happen when good people keep quiet, and this story shows why so many people do.
**Questions or comments below. Let me know what you think.**
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