Author: Alan Jones

Dr. Alan C. Jones

“I don’t know what they are doing out there.”

by Alan Jones

      One of my duties as a Principal was to attend a monthly meeting of Principals in the same athletic conference. At that meeting, we would discuss various topics related to athletic issues: rule changes, scheduling conflicts, and controversial behavior on and off the field. Before the meeting began, over coffee, there was a half an hour or so of gentle banter about the frustrations and challenges of our jobs. In these warm-up conversations, the following two themes emerged:

      Theme #1: “I don’t know what they are doing out there.” That quote came from a colleague who asked me about a recent state mandate requiring schools to establish school improvement teams to review data monthly on various instructional metrics. My colleague knew of my interest in curriculum and instruction and was aware of various innovative instructional programs my school had implemented. He was seeking my advice on how to design and work with such a committee. In his words: “Al, I spend a lot of my time on the nuts and bolts of running a school and working with parents. I don’t know what they are doing out there.” The “they” in the comment was what teachers were doing in classrooms. My colleague was describing an institutional norm in school administration: as educators move up the administrative hierarchy, they increasingly become detached from the concrete realities of classroom life.

      Theme #2: The reality of the classroom is inherently messy. Based on the conversations around the table, the discussion focused heavily on managerial tasks and systemic problems: operational demands that ultimately distracted them from what should be their primary role: instructional leadership. Teaching is essentially a stochastic art, aimed at addressing conditions that are variable, complex, and never fully knowable. When applying this art to the classroom, teachers navigate a maze of unpredictable variables, using their professional knowledge, experimentation, and intuition to align the lesson’s objective and content. It is no surprise, then, that administrators often retreat from this classroom complexity, choosing instead to focus their skills on the concrete tasks like budgeting, scheduling, public relations, and mandate compliance.

     Setting aside the considerable abandonment of instructional leadership, this abdication fosters a mindset that elevates management to the primary organizational role while relegating teaching to a secondary status. Paradoxically, despite the pervasiveness of this managerial mindset, administrators routinely collaborate with district stakeholders to draft mission statements claiming that teaching and learning remain the core focus of their leadership. Administrators mask this paradox by engaging in a purely performative brand of instructional leadership: adopting new programs, hiring external consultants, reporting metrics, and attending professional conferences. Crucially, they learn to speak the educational vernacular of the day, readily deploying the buzzwords like AI literacy, chunking, problem-based learning, differentiated instruction, inclusive classrooms, formative assessment, and standards-based grading.

      What emerges from the joining of this managerial mindset to the realities of the classroom is”, in the words of Seymour B. Sarason, “absentee landlords.” What Sarason meant by the term is administrators and school principals who own the institutional power, control of capital, and dictate policies of the school, yet they rarely spend any meaningful time “living” or working inside the classroom where actual learning takes place.

      What I find discouraging— as I have noted in previous blog posts—is an entire administrative culture that encourages, and even mandates, climbing the career ladder by mastering building operations rather than the complexities of mission-driven educational goals.To put it bluntly: when a colleague admits, “I don’t know what they are doing out there,” it is no longer viewed as an abdication of leadership. Instead, it is treated as a signal that the administrators perfectly understand their actual role in the system.

Why does the debate over D.E.I. miss the point?

by Alan Jones

In my last blog, I posed the question: Why does the debate over affirmative action so often miss the point? I argued that much of the public discourse fixates on surface-level objections—fairness framed narrowly as individual competition—while overlooking both the historical conditions that made such policies necessary and the measurable outcomes they have produced. In that same vein, this blog is devoted to the question: Why does the debate over D.E.I. miss the point? Much like the discourse surrounding affirmative action, the debate over diversity, equity, and inclusion is often framed in ways that obscure more than they reveal.

The concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) was fundamentally sound; the difficulty lay in its implementation. That tension—the persistent “but”—is not incidental but structural. D.E.I. emerged as a response to institutions—universities, corporations, and public agencies—that had long embedded racial and social hierarchies into their everyday practices. The goal was not simply representational diversity, but the dismantling of systemic barriers to access, participation, and success.

Studies show that D.E.I. initiatives can improve students’ sense of belonging, expand access for historically marginalized groups, and enhance learning environments when implemented as part of broader institutional change rather than as isolated programs. More recent survey-based research similarly finds that students and educators tend to view many D.E.I. efforts as broadly effective in fostering supportive campus climates.

At the same time, the implementation problem is well documented. Policy and organizational research consistently show that D.E.I. initiatives yield uneven outcomes when they are fragmented, symbolic, or overly focused on individual attitudes rather than structural change. Interventions such as one-off bias trainings or compliance-driven programs often have limited or even counterproductive effects, whereas reforms that standardize hiring, improve transparency, and address material inequalities tend to produce more durable results. In other words, the evidence suggests that D.E.I. works best when it is embedded in institutional systems—not when it is layered on top of them.

What the current administration has reintroduced into this landscape was not simply a critique of effectiveness, but a more direct challenge to the legitimacy of the project itself. The shift was from debating how to implement equity to questioning whether institutions should pursue it at all. In that sense, the backlash operates less as a technical policy disagreement and more as a reassertion of authority: a return to a model in which existing power structures define merit, fairness, and institutional norms.

Seen through this lens, the conflict over D.E.I. is not just about flawed execution. It reflects a deeper contest over institutional purpose. Research suggests that inclusive reforms can yield measurable benefits—but only when they confront structural inequities directly. Political resistance, by contrast, often reframes those same efforts as overreach, recasting equity initiatives as threats to established hierarchies. The result is a cycle in which partial implementation fuels skepticism, and skepticism, in turn, constrains the very reforms that might have made the policy effective.

This gap between aspiration and execution helps explain both internal frustration and external backlash. As D.E.I. became institutionalized—through hiring practices, curriculum design, and administrative structures—it also became more visible and, therefore, more politically contestable. Even so, data indicate that these practices remain deeply embedded in higher education, including in faculty hiring and evaluation processes, despite legislative and political efforts to curtail them.

Why the Debate Over Affirmative Action Misses the Point

by Alan Jones

Affirmative action has increasingly become a pejorative, a shorthand critique that obscures the policy’s original purpose: to expand access for students who have faced systemic economic, social, and educational barriers. Yet the intensity of the debate over admissions policies often distracts from a more consequential reality documented across decades of educational research: inequality in higher education is driven less by admissions decisions than by disparities in K–12 preparation.

Studies in education policy consistently show that access to well-resourced schools—characterized by experienced teachers, advanced coursework, lower student-to-teacher ratios, and stable learning environments—is one of the strongest predictors of college readiness and completion. Students in affluent suburban and private schools benefit from what sociologists describe as “opportunity structures”: embedded advantages that include not only academic preparation, but also college counseling, extracurricular depth, and social networks that normalize higher education as an expected outcome.

By contrast, schools in economically disadvantaged urban areas often contend with concentrated poverty, underfunding, higher teacher turnover, and external pressures such as community violence. My own experience teaching in such an environment reflected these broader patterns. Despite the presence of capable and motivated students, the institutional conditions necessary to translate ability into academic achievement were inconsistent or absent. Research on “summer learning loss,” resource gaps, and cumulative disadvantage underscores how these disparities compound over time, leaving many students underprepared long before they reach the point of college application.

From a policy perspective, this raises a critical question: can admissions-based interventions meaningfully address inequities that originate much earlier in the educational pipeline? Critics of affirmative action often frame it as an unfair advantage, yet this critique overlooks the systemic advantages already conferred by access to high-performing schools. In effect, the pathway from well-resourced K–12 environments to selective colleges operates as a form of structural preference—one that is largely invisible because it is normalized.

The students I encountered who possessed the intellectual capacity for higher education but did not reach it were not exceptions; they were predictable outcomes of this broader system. The policy debate, therefore, may be misaligned with the problem it seeks to solve. If the goal is genuine educational equity, greater attention must be directed toward early and sustained investment in K–12 systems, rather than relying primarily on corrective measures at the point of college admission.

“What gets noticed”

by Alan Jones

      At a recent gathering of retired school administrators, I listened to conversations that I have titled “what gets noticed.” What I mean by that title is the following comments from administrators in the room are experiences that caught their attention—“what got noticed.”

  • A standout athletic event or performance involving their school
  • Difficult personnel matter
  • Working with difficult parents
  • Working with difficult governing boards
  • A student who succeeded despite difficult odds. 

      While each of the remembrances shared common qualities—emotionally charged, a challenge or conflict, a human story—they all lacked any connection to what school mission statements point to as an aim of schooling—raising the level of student thinking and reasoning. If the men and women seated around me were pursuing mission-driven goals, then the following experiences would have caught their attention—“what got noticed.”

  • The nature of student work.
  • The substance of lessons
  • Student sense-making
  • Classroom discourse
  • Teacher responsiveness

      My takeaway from that retirement gathering, the same takeaway I had from numerous administrative meetings, is that the primary function of our occupations as school administrators is improving teaching and learning in our schools. Mission-driven leadership asks leaders to notice not the most visible moments of schooling—but the most meaningful ones—the moments where thinking is being shaped, extended, and revealed.

“Habits of the Mind”

by Alan Jones

      In a discussion about what should be included in school curricula, Dewey argued that the age-old debate over curriculum content was misguided. In his words, it is not “what” should be included in the curriculum, but rather the habits of the mind and methods of inquiry that each discipline develops. As we can all attest, and as cognitive research documents, most of what is in the curriculum — names, dates, locations, rules, categories, classifications —is often taught as isolated pieces of information. Students memorize them long enough to pass a test, and they are quickly forgotten minutes after leaving Friday’s test. When students engage in the methods of inquiry for a discipline, information becomes durable because it is repeatedly used.

      For Dewey, every academic discipline represents a distinct way of investigating the world. In science, facts become tools for explaining phenomena. In history, dates become anchors for understanding causation and narrative. In mathematics, formulas become instruments for solving problems. In economics the exchange of good and services become a method for trade-off analysis. In political science, policy analysis becomes a tool for how power is organized and exercised.

      As I have argued in past blogs, systems of accountability require measurable outcomes—-tests, benchmarks, and documentation that demonstrate compliance with institutional goals. These compliance systems privilege the recall of information: names, dates, rules, classification, and procedures. What they struggle to measure are the far more important outcome Dewey emphasized—habits of inquiry, disciplined skepticism, interpretative judgment, and the capacity to investigate complex problem.

      The result in predictable. School increasingly organize the curriculum around what can be documented and tested, even when educators know that what matters most for long-term intellectual growth are the ways of thinking students repeatedly practice while learning the content of a discipline.