Inputs, Comments on Article on Education

Article: Instructional Leadership Behavior of Papua New Guinea high school principals: a provincial case study

Boe, Lahui-Ako


Reflection points/inputs by: Ramon George Atento (Nov 7, 2005)


While I believe that every piece of literature I have read (so far) pertaining to educational leadership and administration have always been at least interesting and at most entirely useful, thanks to our most able professors, there are some good points about this research that points towards being better instructional leadership, that is, a focus more on what we should be in the first place.

Again, while I believe these checklists are often incomplete, inadequate and most of the times, inappropriate as to setting, there are alignments in our settings (PNG and RP) that make us want to embrace the checklists given by the author for good leadership - collaboration, communication, feedback, influence and professionalism.

Further, again, there is the insistence on certain points that are nevertheless not entirely new to us, being practitioners in the educational leadership: vision, shared leadership, risk-taking (once classified by Barth, 2000 for his Model of a good school), a focus on people, education aspects of school rather than purely technical perspective.

Again, we see the same complaints of the surveyed PNG principals (the author, and presumably, the teachers themselves) that there is a serious lack of principal training. Add to this the repeated insistence that the principals lack time to do their job well). The same is true for the other literature that we read. For example, Parkay and Hall (1992) although focused on the Beginning Principals and Leithwood and Montgomery (1986) have moaned consistently in their studies for lack of principal training.

America and Britain have their shares of wantokism, our version of the padrino system ("blood is thicker than water", or "it's not what you know but whom you know"). But, with due respect to the system – and the expertise of the principals chosen, I do believe that the principals themselves are not (all) completely illiterate in management, or worse, simply there because they know somebody from up there. It is also summary executionism to put them all to the waste basket for lack of expertise, creativity, eadership, responsibility, etc.

One thing I notice is that teachers (the author of the article is a teacher) mostly criticize their principals to death for heaven and hell and everything in between. I was a teacher then and we too criticized the system we were in. Looking back, I realized now that I was a Theory Y (or Z) person in a Theory X environment - with a leader who would rather think of us as likened to factory workers and what-have-you. Bottom line, we were dismissed back then as meaningless and insignificant. There was no sharing of leadership or teacher empowerment. To prove my point, we were experiencing a yearly teacher turn-over rate of about 30-40% I guess. Last year, at least ten of us left. I heard now that they are doing badly with the new ones for incompetence and uncaring attitude.

Then, I became a leader myself. Although my present set-up is a lot lower in stature than my former school in terms of facilities, curriculum implementation and evaluation. (The system is far worse - an unexistent manual of operations etc.) - teacher turn-over rate has been practically zero for the last four or five years. Plus, the students in my new school rated their teachers better than we were rated back in my former school (though not significant). What was the reason for that? I have my opinions on this but they are untested, uncorrelated and too much for this write-up so I would rather not talk about it here. Perhaps in summary, I would point out here that the success and failure of the school, though influenced greatly by the availability of an instructional leader (Lipman, 1985) - cannot be solely accounted by it. The teachers play an important role. I keep on saying this because new principals (those of us who care, mind you) were caring teachers too. Barth (2000) described us as teachers who thought they can change the system. Perhaps, we can, but not during our beginning year (Parkay and Hall, 1992)

I will put it this way. The article focuses on complaints of teachers (31 vs 5?) to their principals. Usually principals are outnumbered this way, even more. Bigger schools have the ratio in the hundred I guess. Now, may I contend that of these 100 teachers, perhaps not the best will rise to be principal. But he/she is not certainly one among the lower half of the norm. The only lacking factor in the newly hired principal is this: lack of training. S/he is not ready to be a principal because s/he has been a teacher/area coor/assistant to whomever. There was no prior knowledge of how it is down there.

I just watched a movie (documentary) about Robert McNamara, secretary of defense to Kennedy and Johnson during the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam War. His "lessons" (of the 11) has this as numero uno: "Emphatize with the enemy". Put yourself in his shoes. Elsewhere, Sun Tzu remarked, "If you know yourself and your enemy, you will not fear the results of a hundred battles". We must know where we stand, and where our staff stands. Hence, there are theories on motivation (content and process theories), and countless checklists on how to influence, coerce and make your staff follow you to the ends of the world. But when you are down there (at the fifteen foot line, with no more time remaining, two shots, the opponent leads by one) you throw the statistics behind you. So what if you are Rick Barry or Larry Bird?
So what if you made the last two hundred free throw baskets consecutively, that is, without missing a shot?

Without some knowledge of how they stand more or less, it is always crisis management. It is always like war management. In war, as the movie I talked about above points out, the leader (presumably the general or the secretary of defense) often commits a mistake. And several thousands of people, including civilians, might be killed. Sure you can commit them but you can never ever repeat the same mistake. You could erase a country in the globe for that.

The problem with leadership is not always about the principals, although talking to my classmates, Patricia, Andy, and May among others, one will certainly battle the theory in my mind. But, as I am fond of being at the other side all the time, principals cannot be all wrong. I was educated in UST, where our patron saint, my favorite, St. Thomas Aquinas maintained that even the "dull and ignorant has something to say", and that we must regard not the person speaking but the truth spoken. Hence, we must say that as Hume, and Kierkegaard and Sartre are athiests (for the summary executioners), for the wide-eyed thinkers - including our venerable John Paul II, they too have something to say. They cannot be all wrong.

The only thing that we have to recommend here is that somehow principals should open their eyes on the most pressing things around them - the direction of the school, the VMGO, and the communication of this direction to the staff. I believe that most principals are regarded in a shallow manner by his/her teachers because of this lack of communication of goals. Dr. Munoz somehow alluded to this fact when she talked about a study (hers, from what I remember) that it is an essential factor in leadership that the principal has interpersonal skills.

Another thing is the motivation and attitude of the staff. This will be the focus of our report. It is one thing to have good teachers. If you have two good teachers in your school, that's equivalent to twenty more because they can influence their peers to do better (I remember the song "Stout-hearted men" from grade school: Give me ten and I'll soon give you ten thousand more). But expectancy theory prompts us, if they know not where this competency and caring will amount to, either they will stop being motivated (they will have negative attitudes) or they will simply find a new environment. Somehow, I got from Dr. Habulan's lectures last term that mostly, Theory Y people are the people who are most prone to get out of a bad system the quickest possible way. It's in their veins. They are the easiest to motivate (being intrinsically motivated) but they will leave immediately (or will start to not care) if there is no expectation of a reward (monetary, or otherwise).

Moving to procedural matters however - What despaired me in the article the most is the lack of consistency on the statistical treatment. And one thing that is of my essence is that I cannot trust something that has no statistical basis to begin with. In the first place the methodology used for rating is inconsistent. I was reading to the article - 30 plus and all - hoping that a redemption will come towards the end. But, 30 pages and at least 1.5 hours after -I came to the end. What?

Firstly, the author used a 5-point Likert scale to rate the instructional leadership styles of the principals in PNG. It's a good plan. But then, he (?) converted this to unsatisfactory (1,2,3) and satisfactory 4,5)

While this is probably okay towards the end (when we are about to get the means, interpret and all), this is a no-no in statistics. In the hierarchy of scales, interval (Likert) comes a step higher than the quasi-nominal satisfactory/ unsatisfactory (like Yes/no, Male/Female, Pass/Fail). It would have been better to retain the 5 point scale and get the average. Then, at least compare the self=ratings of the principals and the teachers - find the correlation perhaps (or find if there are significant differences - add.). Then, and only then, can you convert this to satisfactory and unsatisfactory in the final analysis.

As if it is not enough, he then turned towards analyzing through the frequency table (unsatisfactory versus satisfactory). This he did without any mention of any non-parametric study (chi-square would have been appropriate), nor any statistical referencing (critical values) etc. In the first place, summarizing the 1,2, and 3 as unsatisfactory and 4,5 as satisfactory will naturally skew the distribution to the right. Normal (and classical) probability will put the odds at 3 to 2 that the principals will be rated unsatisfactorily.

I did the mathematics back home (hence, the long input), and this is what I got:

Using a non-parametric stat (Chi-Square, I have no choice that's the only thing available for the data given)

Table 2: Defining community goals – X2 = 5.45 not significant
Table 3: Managing curriculum and instruction X2 = 19.88 significant
Table 4: Positive Learning Climate X2 = 58.32 significant
Table 5: Feedback X2 = 1.95 not significant
Table 6: Assessment of progress X2 = 1.79 not significant

So there you go, the results were significant only (at 0.05) in the "managing curriculum and instruction" (which is, sadly, the very core of instructional leadership nevertheless), and "giving positive learning climate" (again, very important if not essential as instructional leaders, from the lectures and sharing of our Dr. Mich Munoz)

Towards the end, the author was maintaining that the results point to being significant towards unsatisfactory rating, but the big question is how? Having mentioned no statistical test, we can dismiss his results as insignificant and likened to a high school report. My students last year in high school fared better – as they were introduced to SPSS for WIndows - and the reliability measurements.

This pains me but as I am a positive person, I viewed it this way. If an article such as this can make its way to the web, and the journal (?) where it was published, we too can! I can do better than this guy! Hence, I am all the more inflamed to do better in every way and be the best that I can be.

The other things will surely be shared by my classmates.



References:

Agresti, A & Finlay, B. (1986). Statistics for the Social Sciences. San Francisco CA: Dellen Publishing:

Barth, Roland (2000). Improving Schools from Within. New York: Mc-Graw-Hill.

Clavell, J. (1983). The Art of War by Sun Tzu. New York: Doubleday Press.

Fisher, RA and Yates, F. (1974). Statistical Tables for Biological, Agricultural and Medical Research. London: Longman Group.

Leithwood, Kenneth and Montgomery, Deborah. (1986). The Principal Profile. Ontario: OISE Press.

Lipman, JM, Rankin, RE and Hoeh, JA Jr. (1985). The Principalship Concepts, Competencies and Cases. New York: Lomgman.

Lunenburg, Frederic and Ornstein, Allan (2000). Educational Administration: Concepts and Practices (3rd edition). CA: Wadsworth, Thomason Learning

Mc Gregor, Douglas. (1960). The Human Side of the Enterprise. NY: Mc-Graw-Hill.

Ouchi, William. (1981). Theory Z. Reading, Massachussetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing.

Parkay, Forrest and Hall, Gene E (1992). Becoming a Principal: The Challenges of Beginning Leadership. Massachussetts: Allyn and Bacon.