Since the principal-agent
model contains the word principal, I’m going to assume that the example I’m
thinking of will apply. The best example I can come up with is teachers who
serve as agents for their boss, the principal, and their students whom they are
designated to educate. I can think of other parties that teachers also serve as
agents to, some of these being: parents, school board, legislators, as well as
their peers. One of the hardest parts of teaching is appealing to each and
every one of those principals, which can be especially difficult when they
stand in disagreement as they often do. A more specific situation could be in a
math class, in order to appeal to the student’s needs, a teacher may try to
assign less homework or, even more realistically, test less. While this is an
action students would applaud, it is not something the principal and the school
administration would support, especially considering the increased emphasis on
testing as a way to gauge teacher performance.
On that same topic, teacher
performance and how to accurately measure it is a topic disagreed upon by most
professionals in education. Sometimes the teacher students judge to be the best
and most fun, is not by school and state standards performing at the level they
should be. In practice, discrepancies can be resolved primarily through
compromise. There is a change of command which ideally provides a sort of
checks and balances system to make everyone as happy as possible. Concessions
must be usually made by both parties in order to reach agreement. Another
potential way to resolve the conflict could be for one party to buy out or
bribe the other in order to get them to agree on one side or the other. In education,
teachers can get fired for doing what they think is right or best for their
students, but it is rare for them to get in trouble for listening to their
principal or administration. It’s definitely an interesting topic to think
about considering I’ll be in the teacher’s shoes next year. And in my case not
only will I be responsible to appeasing my students and the school principal,
but also listening to my parent organization, Teach for America, as well. It
will be a lot of people to please, that’s for sure.
If we thus view this sort of
relationship to be a typical principal-agent model for the school system, it is
clear why there is so much controversy over how to best run the school system,
due to the presence of multiple principals with differing ideas on what they
want done. Similar to the article we read earlier on in the semester, there a
spectrum has developed on how to evaluate teacher performance, spanned on
either side by Michelle Rhee and Diane Ravitch. As of yet, no solution to this
multi-principle agent problem has been successful in answering the question of
how to best answer the teacher evaluation question. What the camps both do
agree on is that there needs to be some system in place for performance
evaluation, which means there is a starting point for a compromise to be made,
probably farther down the road.
With regard to K-12, I would not consider students as principals. If you take students out of the equation, and ask whether the school principal and the parents have preferences not in alignment about what the teacher should do, perhaps there is, but I wish you had spelled it out more. I will give an example below; it would have been good for you to provide a similar example. At a coarse level, you would think that both of them would want the kid to learn, so in that sense the preferences coincide.
ReplyDeleteWhere there might be disagreement, is on what teacher the kid gets and/or what classroom the kid gets assigned to. There also might be disagreement on how much individual attention the kid gets. Here is a specific example.
When my older son was in the first grade he got tested for the gifted program at school and passed that test. He moved into a gifted classroom for second grade. It was a classroom that had both second and third graders - all gifted. It also had a rather inexperienced teacher. My son was the youngest. He also couldn't read. The teacher assigned a lot of homework. My son couldn't do it. The teacher made no accommodation for his lack of reading. It became very stressful. We ultimately pulled him from the gifted classroom and put him into a regular class. We took him to a (private) reading specialist and learned he had something in the dyslexia area. He got special training for reading from them. In third grade the school provided a reading specialist who worked with him by pulling him out of the regular class. So they eventually did address his needs, but they didn't in second grade.
The story has a happy ending. He's a reader now. But his spelling is atrocious.
My brother went through a very similar experience in elementary school (he is also dyslexic) and like you, my parents fought the school for years to provide more individualized attention. That sort of situation, where parents and teachers are in direct conflict over what is best for the student, is definitely a frequently occurring triangle problem. And the example you lay out is in fact almost identical to the one I could cite myself.
DeleteI feel like you're example is extremely relevant because we read about this a lot especially concerning the Chicago public school system. While the Chicago school system faces a vast array of problems, I feel like the question of how best to educate and accommodate different students is always a hot topic. While parents and teachers seem to share the goal of educating students, there is constant conflict about the best ways to do this and what needs to be done to fix the system.
DeleteYour example is interesting and relevant to our experience. Even though I am not sure whether teachers consider student as principal, I think there is a triangle relationship between students, teachers, and schools. I knew the public school system in the U.S. sometimes struggle with the teachers' performance and students' satisfaction and it is relatively flexible. As a result, there are many variables to consider. Usually, school assigns teachers without negotiation with students and their parents. I remembered in my 10th grade, my head teacher (In China, each class has a director teacher) was unexperienced and he totally messed up the relationship to all students and some parents even collected signatures to change this teacher. Even though I think he finished the job assigned by school, the imbalance from other side sometimes can cause really serious problem.
ReplyDelete