The din is deafening. The arrogantly loud, unendearing, unpleasant and prolonged noise by Ms Mary Redman is getting to me. The wall of sound keeps resonating like a fire alarm for a blaze Ms Redman has herself set.
I have no qualms about making a judgement on the Alexandra School quagmire. It has existed for far too long, partly because we have a Ministry of Education with little backbone, a Minister of Education who is looking for friends – and votes – and a teachers’ union that believes even the guilty should be protected. We must not permit the school to be turned into a courtroom, where sides are consumed by technicalities of the law and of education regulations.
I am tired of the half a yard of guff that Ms Redman has been churning out morning and night through the media. There she was on the Front Page of the last SATURDAY SUN in hot red, and smug, with a raised fistful of revenge, happily visualizing the rolling head of Alexandra principal Jeff Broomes. Nothing the Barbados Secondary Teachers’ Union (BSTU) president has said in this current series of noisemaking has impressed me that the students of Alexandra are at the centre of its concerns – or are even a part of them.
Ms Redman and some of her colleagues keep on about Mr Broomes’ management style. They seem more concerned about form than substance, about teacher vanity than study effectiveness, about their egos than about their students’ minds. Ms Redman is committed to fighting to the death at Alexandra – though the children there should perish.
Worse yet, she is invoking other teachers, who reportedly have no problem with their principals or their schools, to join in her crusade of expurgation of Jeff Broomes and his way of doing things.
Those of us who have the task of managing these days know well that if you are not up to the challenge, you will be run over. You have to be strong; and strong leaders are becoming an endangered species. I speak not of Prime Ministers.
Paradoxically, Barbadians love strong Prime Ministers, but adore weak bosses.
They insist that their bosses should do their work for them – at least cover up their mistakes; empathize with their frequent sicknesses; never tell them they are wrong but that they are unfortunate; never tell them their work is poor, because that is demotivating, but instead that they have some latent potential to be great since such undeserved kudos would help the organization.
If you are not a hypocrite these days, you are not a good manager. It gives you the collywobbles!
A great manager is supposed to win friends without influencing people. He lets his staff go and come as they like, whenever they want to, late or early; do no work if they wish – for a week; for a month; for a term! A friend told me a civil servant once did it for a year – with impunity.
Managers who endure and survive these horrors in submission and quietude are hailed as worker-oriented and progressive. Clearly, Mr Broomes is not of that ilk.
Some commentators have been suggesting that the Ministry of Education get some spunk and drag Ms Redman of the BSTU and Mr Broomes to a sit-down, and to a firm resolution of the impasse. But can anything good come of a meeting with an adversary committed to the demise of the other?
Well, we can hope.
Ms Redman suggests that the straw that broke the camel’s back is Mr Broome’s allusion, at last Alexendra School speech day, to a senior teacher’s going through an entire term refusing to teach a class of fourth form students assigned to her. The BSTU is miffed that the principal would utter such an obscenity before students.
Shiver me timbers, the students already knew!
Part of the problem may have to do with current teacher evaluation. As far as the BSTU is concerned, ineffective teachers don’t really exist. Teachers, it would appear, could be evaluated by observation, where they are put into one of two categories: “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory” – despite the Ministry of Education’s cumbersome official instrument of assessment.
The first step in the solution is simple: evaluation majorly based on evidence of student learning.
Any other arrangement continues to be a cop-out, and its management a veritable hot spot.
