Rough Notes, Beginning Thoughts on School Administrator "Walk-Throughs"

From "The Principal's Partnership: A Program of Union Pacific Foundation" (UP railroad corporation)

The concept of the walk-through has been introduced as a new idea, it became and remains an educational fad. If the school is actually "a model home" as Col. Parker once wrote (a colleague of John Dewey and the founder of the school to which Dewey sent his children), then a walk through it should not be so unpracticed, so conceptually exotic. When I walk into my daughter's room after she has come home from school, I don't look to see that she is busy at tasks, I look to interact with her. I look to enjoy her as a part of the home she helps us to create. The same is true regarding my husband in our home-office.

When walk-throughs are presented as cultures other than white are often presented in schools, they feel towards teachers like another "add-on," like another opportunity to be disciplined, like something abstract and regulatory, like an interruption. See here from the "ProTeacher Community" discussion board a teacher's fear regarding the walk-through. So strange a concept is it to her that she is averse to what should be seen and practiced as the active participation of her principal in the school community.

The responses to "act56" a "senior member" are predominantly like the ones below from "Hokie Fan," another "senior member" and "Leah E," a "member." Some were encouraging, but only to the extent that other teachers were telling her that "it's not so bad" (emphasis mine).

In independent schools, principals do not usually write in their planners, "Study protocols then walk through school building." The private in this sense easily veils the corporate; it softens it, makes business principals and the operation of the independent school as a business, which it very much is with its boards of trustees, capital campaigns, and often multi-million dollar "asks" by "external affairs" directors.

Yet, an asset of most independent schools is that they are high on community: promoting it, developing it continuously, innovating it, symbolizing it, ritualizing it. The cost is that the greater they build their community, the tighter it is, the more alive and fervent, the more they see their community as the community. Being that independent schools are culturally--predominantly--white, it follows that community engagement means an engagement with--a commitment to the social norms and cultural values of--whiteness.

In the realm of the private, then, community is an almost organic priority; so much so that it needs not to be scheduled in, encouraged by those who rule, written down as an official procedure or system of established rules for behavior. Why is it that in the realm of the public we must train community into the community body?

Why must we treat it like an exercise routine where we provide step-by-step instructions as well as mantras for while the concept is of value? The public is the space that responds to the private, that reacts to its policies, that also complies with the image of the private body. The public must be trained and disciplined. The private has liberty. When do the two cross and meet? Do they? Can they? What would be the cost to the private if this happened?

In the video that opens this post, we see whiteness as it mocks what it considers to be blackness while trying to put value into something that the private--hence, whiteness--takes for granted/appears to grow organically: walk-throughs.

Using humor, the intent of the video is to goad educators (administrators specifically) into committing to the "walk-through" as a cultural practice. Unknowingly, the video actually demonstrates how ridiculous it is to encourage a process that, ultimately, as school community members we are "supposed to do" (as Chris Rock would say). In what ways does whiteness not just make fun of blackness here--or rather use blackness as a resource for its own gain--while unconsciously ridiculing itself for its own rigid cultural measures? Measures like mandatory walks through a school, which again, should be "a model home."

Do we walk through our own homes perfunctorily? We must ask, why do we come at youth in this way, as regulators? The public is always asked to regulate, discipline, manage itself; it is asked to become a constabulary. We regulate ourselves and "adopt an attitude of adhesion" to the image (Paulo Freire) of the private.

If principals were engaged in not just the business of schools but the community building of schools (which is a necessary part of their job responsibilities), we wouldn't have the need for walk-throughs--the head of school would already know what is missing, of what there is a predominance, what needs to be supported more, and what needs to be thrown away. We wouldn't need "guides" and "reports" on walk-throughs; its benefits, its rise, its protocols.

And, I say these guides are still not what we need in the schools of the public. We need to begin to think of the school as a group of people who come from many places, representing multiple communities who live together in one space . . . an association of people for the mutual support and pursuit of a common goal: to learn in parallel, both youth and elder; to become an active part of the public; to love self and other.