SCENE FOUR
CROSS EXAMINATION OF THE POWER VARIABLE
JUDGE
Defendant Lawyer, you may cross – examine Teacher Terry.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
Thank you Your Honor. (TO TEACHER TERRY) Ms. Terry, it seems that your low opinion of Dr. Lipservice’s dealings with the School Improvement Team is only part of your general low opinion of him.
PLAINTIFF LAWYER
Your Honor, objection, how can Defendant Lawyer infer that from direct testimony?
JUDGE
I’ll allow this line for a few minutes more to see if Defendant Lawyer can make the connection. You may proceed.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
Thank you. (TO TEACHER TERRY). Please answer the question.
TEACHER TERRY
For the most part, he was and is harmless. I view him more as a manager than as a leader and when he left his staff to their own talents, for the most part we did right by the school’s students. At times he can be overbearing and will try to impose his own curriculum and instruction beliefs on us without really taking the time to help us understand his reasoning or the rationale for how he thought things should be.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
More a manager than a leader? Sounds like he is a leader if he did try to implement new teaching strategies and programs.
TEACHER TERRY
He did and still does walk the halls with a clipboard making or referring to notes he has. He spends a lot of time writing memos about which side of the halls students should walk, pumping assembly schedules out, inspecting bulletin boards for their timeliness, that kind of thing. I don’t see that as leader.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
A principal has to be both a manager and leader?
TEACHER TERRY
By that I mean the staff’s and my view of a leader is someone who can engage his staff in dialogue, someone who can help them recognize issues and work with each other to address those issues in a collaborative, creative manner. This is not Dr. Lipservice’s style at all. If anyone offered an idea to him in a faculty or so-called staff development meeting, he would consistently reject it. Often he would ridicule the idea and launch into a speech about how he was the final decision-maker in all things pertaining to the operation and success of the building.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
You are the building’s Union Representative?
TEACHER TERRY
I am.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
Is it possible that your view of Dr. Lipservice is colored by the role you must play as a union official?
TEACHER TERRY
(SQUIRMS A BIT) Well yes I do play that role. And I do chafe when my teacher colleagues are demeaned and when our leader makes unilateral decisions in areas that are properly part of the school improvement shared decision-making process. And since the union had signed off on the provisions of the process, I expected that the process would be honored.
DEFENDANT LAWYER
Thank you Ms. Terry. We will pursue this issue in later testimony.
JUDGE
Ms. Terry, you can step down. Plaintiff, please call your next witness.
…
The Defendant Lawyer has tried to draw the lines of what is by research, the most stark issue that afflicts poorly executed School Improvement / Shared Decision-Making Teams. He begins to lay the foundation for the principal’s ultimate authority in all instructional areas of a school and also begins to try to show that the very roles that stakeholders may play naturally come in conflict with the power variable. Teacher Terry did refer to the “provisions” that the Union signed off to. Typically such arrangements have a kind of set of operating principles and bylaws that purport to outline the power boundaries of such processes. And as typically, they become blurred and poorly misunderstood, likely out of each stakeholder’s, including a principal’s, self- perception of how they can or may not contribute to this process’ success.
Can you identify similar circumstances in your own experiences? How or were these resolved?
~Richard Bernato, Ed.D.