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.
Alan C. Jones 