Reader Reply
School Administrator, December 2015


Athletics’ Proper Role

Compliments on the August 2015 issue. What you produced is the best publication on the role of athletics in public school systems I have ever seen in print – and I joined AASA as a young superintendent back in 1958.

As a high school principal and superintendent, I continually wrestled with the purpose of athletics in the schools I served. Too many parents and others placed primary emphasis on the won-loss records of the sports teams. I reminded them that the purpose of professional sports was to entertain and make money, whereas the sports program in our junior high and high schools was intended for a different purpose. School sports exist to help each participant grow in self-confidence and should never exist principally to entertain the public. Sometimes, this is a hard sell to some in our communities and even to some school board members.

I believe in a good scholastic sports programs, but I believe music, drama, debate, cheerleading, dance programs and other activities are just as valuable for students. As school leaders, we always must remember ourselves the primary place of athletics in the public schools.

Ken Severson
AASA Life Member,
Shelburne, Vt.


Civility Strategies

I am compelled to comment on John Gratto’s My View column “Addressing Incivility in a Civil Manner” (August 2015). His advice to focus on building relationships while under attack is particularly applicable.

Over my 28 years in Arizona education, I have found that being attacked presents a true opportunity to understand the source of the attacker’s frustration (the old Stephen Covey axiom of attempting to understand before being understood comes to mind) and then to use that understanding to bring the critic on board with what you are attempting to accomplish. I vividly remember doing this as a basketball coach in a small, rural town by building a relationship that has lasted well beyond the conflict and turned the attacker into a solid supporter.

Additionally, using data to generate public support continues to be an important tool for me in working with my school board. Attackers rarely can support their arguments with data. An attack, by its very nature, is emotional and not rooted in rational thought. As superintendent, I usually have direct access to most or all of the applicable data for use on such occasions.

Lance Heister
Superintendent,
Winslow Unified School District,
Winslow, Ariz.



John Gratto’s column on dealing with incivility shared great advice and modeled what he did during his own career as a superintendent.

Charles W. Fowler
President,
School Leadership LLC,
Exeter, N.H.


Rethinking Doctorates

Re School Administrator’s March 2015 theme issue, “Rethinking Doctorates”:

In November 1997, Phi Delta Kappan published  “Does Graduate Training in Educational Administration Improve America’s Schools?” based on data from the authors’ 1987-88 “Schools and Staffing Survey,” involving 6,341 elementary, junior high/middle and high schools. The study found that administrators with a doctorate were no better than those without.  They were only able to cite one empirical study that distinguished administrators with a doctorate.

Back in 1992, I completed a small empirical study comparing the instructional leadership of administrators with and without the doctorate, published in The Journal of the California Association of Professors of Educational Administration (Vol. 4, No. 1).  Nondoctorate administrators provided examples of their instructional leadership that indicated they often were working to get an organization running more smoothly or following through on someone else’s leadership initiative.  

On the other hand, doctorate-holding administrators provided examples of a higher and sometimes creative level of administrative leadership. The nondoctorates said they “informed,” “arranged,” “answered,” “implemented” and “assisted;” the doctorates “led,” “established,” “wrote” and “created.”

My colleagues, Anthony Van Reusen and Jianjun Wang, and I completed a study (published in the 2012 Yearbook of the National Council of Professors of Educational Administration) based on longitudinal data from the National Center for Education Statistics in which we found some support for the education master’s degree, but to date our profession has not shown convincingly that the study of educational administration results in better school administrators at either the master’s degree or doctoral level, and this is a major problem for our profession.

While it is not surprising that Bill Gates and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are telling school districts there is no need to pay educators more for having a master’s degree, it is disappointing to hear the Carnegie Foundation working to separate the preparation of the “Ed.D. doers” from the “Ph.D. thinkers.” Establishing separate degree tracks would affirm a belief in an intrinsic “separability” of research from practice that is contrary to the need for research in practice.  
The fact some dissertations have extremely limited applicability suggests that those dissertations probably have not made a uniquely significant contribution to the knowledge base and therefore do not qualify as doctoral dissertations. Many of those single-district so-called “dissertations” should be labeled as master’s theses.   

Please recognize that the narrow training of school administrators to become “professional practitioners as technicians” without a deep philosophical and historical understanding of public education plays right into the hands of those who need managers to privatize public education.

Louis Wildman
Professor of Educational Administration,
California State University-Bakersfield,
Bakersfield, Calif.





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Fax: 703-841-1543. E-mail: magazine@aasa.org