My son has returned to school. He’s now in second grade, with a new teacher, a different set of classmates, and a summer of experiences added to his emerging view of the world. He spent half of his summer in Seattle and half in Scarborough, in his father’s new home, along with a couple of side trips, one to San Antonio (where he spent a couple of days with the family of a friend and a reader of this site) and one to Pittsburgh (where he spent three days with his mother’s parents and hopefully absorbed as little as possible of their general air of angry disappointment).
Meanwhile, back in Seattle, his school got a new principal. I don’t envy public elementary school principals in the least. They are only mid-level administrators; their relationship to the teachers is governed by a union collective bargaining agreement over which they have no control (the district administration owns it), which ties their hand on making active personnel decisions. Curriculum is similarly controlled at once by district standards and, subversively at the classroom level, by the actual teacher; the principal can only rule by hearsay and indirect pressure. And yet parents, staff, and the district looks to them as “leaders” of their schools. It’s perhaps the most difficult leadership role one could imagine: no discretion, no actual responsibility, but an almost avalanche of accountability.
The “clients” of the principal’s school, moreover, are by and large insane: parents. As a parent who tries not to be a pain, but as a co-parent with someone who extends her own hypochondria to her child, I know I’m part of the problem, but I’ve been able to develop relationships with teachers and staff which reveal what is probably not a very interesting fact: most parents are either hypersensitive to any perception that their child is not special, is not perfect, is not getting 150% of the resources available to them, or else have ditched their child at the foot of public education and said “he’s yours now, I’m going back to working two jobs, or nursing my opioid addiction, or acting like a child myself.” One special education teacher told my ex-wife and me that they wished every set of parents were as understanding and dedicated as we were; given my knowledge of our own situation, it made me freeze in terror in consideration of what other parents must be like. And yet principals, one step behind the actual teacher, are viewed by parents as the focal point of accountability in the school.
The only levers principals have are their ability to communicate, their charm, and their ability to migrate or deflect blame so as to ensure the environment’s purpose – to nurture and teach small children on the small part of their lives’ adventure from toddlerhood to pre-pubescence, hopefully imparting some knowledge and developing their intelligence as well – is not disrupted by the external forces of politics, budgeting, and parental interference that could bring it crashing down. Deflect blame for idiotic budgeting or standards or curriculum decisions to the district or state or federal authorities; communicate to staff and teachers the collective views of parent associations in a way which mitigates the flame of uninformed criticism most parents direct towards the educational process; shield the student body itself from the worst incivilities of the external forces of union representatives, from the district administrators and school boards with one eye on the election cycle and another on their careers, from their own parents’ worst behavior.
Being a principal is therefore a courageous endeavor, but it requires a kind of magically light touch. And my son’s new principal has fists of ham.
My son came home from the first day of school and mentioned that the school lunch routine had been altered. His school has six grades – K through 5 – and two grades at a time each have lunch at a given half hour slot; his second graders share it with the kindergarteners. Last year, when first and fourth graders shared the half hour, the children were invited to mingle, the idea being that older kids could “mentor” the younger kids and younger kids could maintain the relationships they had in kindergarten. Functionally, it meant that the kids found their friends and enjoyed their time together, building the easy familiarity of mealtimes with non-family members. This year, though, each class – not grade, but class within each grade – has to eat at the same table. My son didn’t like this. I didn’t particularly care, but I found it odd that we had yet to get any communication from the principal that described her philosophy to running the school, to managing the day, blah blah blah. I was, apparently, going to find out about how the school was administered via the helpful descriptions provided by a seven year old. I thought to myself okay, I should probably meet his teacher and have a catch up with the office staff. No biggie, but for a new principal, this felt like an opportunity lost.
Then what will become known as the Great Pledge of Allegiance Kerfuffle of 2019 erupted.
A word of background for our non-US readers who may not be aware of the Pledge of Allegiance: the Pledge is a brief “pledge” that school children have repeated for years at the beginning of the school day. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The monotony of it, combined with the uses of concepts and words like republic, indivisible, liberty, justice, inspires parody amongst most schoolyard wits, and a vague sense of proto-fascism for anyone who worries about the dangers of rote with respect to political thinking. Indeed, the Supreme Court ruling that established the right to dissent and refuse to repeat the Pledge by any child made one of those wonderful comments that make Supreme Court rulings the modern equivalent of the Nicomachaen Ethics:
“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein”
How lovely. How true. Another wrinkle in all of this is that as originally conceived, the Pledge would involve children holding their right arms outstretched, palm down, slightly elevated, directed towards the flag in the front of the school room. Picture a couple dozen kids with the Nazi salute towards the US flag in 1935 and you’ve got the right idea. That changed after the war, but still, the image probably does as much to me to indicate the brilliance of Justice Robert Jackson’s quote above as the words themselves.
Another bit of background: my son goes to school in Seattle, possibly the most left-wing major city in the US. It has been for over a century; it was the only major city to have a Socialist mayor and city council (in the 1910s), and remains so left-wing it’s wrapping around the other side. People compete to be more politically correct, to reject any notion of traditional politics. Jeremy Corbyn would be viewed as mainstream here, or more likely as a bit suspicious simply by virtue of his age, skin color, and willingness to engage in party leadership. Obama is viewed as a half-hearted sellout whose only real virtue was to be black – I’m sorry, I can’t actually mention that he’s black because that would be racist, only black people can mention race in Seattle, and while I can apologize for the apostasy, I can never be forgiven for the sin. [Discuss: compare with the evangelical conception of pre-destination and French revolutionary concepts of the unforgiveability of dissention]. In such an environment, the Pledge of Allegiance in north Seattle is so passé as to be outside of the realm of consideration – and that is as obvious as oxygen.
And one last point: I did the Pledge of Allegiance every day in school from probably first grade til fifth or sixth grade, I can’t remember which – and possibly more but at that point it certainly didn’t register. And I remember distinctly that no one cared. By making it a non-event – by making it insignificant, by teachers and students running through the motions, by no one caring one iota except to get through it – we Mainers, we who are a fundamentally disdainful and inconsiderate people, ensured that there was not the least taint of fascism in what was an essentially fascist dogmata. We ensured it was empty – neither true nor false, just a tedium, like the daily message from the principal over the PA system, which was to be endured so as to continue with the full meaning of life.
So we return to the Great Kerfuffle: while we didn’t get any thoughts on her intentions for the school, we did get a blast email from the principal just before the school year started, a form letter saying she was excited to be coming to the school, she’d been in education for 24 years, was a mother herself, the normal blather. Again, no mention of any changes, indeed an overarching tone of “nothing to see hear, move along.” A week into the year, we received an email:
As the new principal of [the school], I have structured our morning routine as I have for many years as a school principal: by having students come to my office to lead the Pledge of Allegiance. The recital of the pledge is required by state law, RCW 28A.230.140, and School Board Policy 2333. As a result, it is important we follow the law and equally important we follow the portion of the law which permits students to not participate.
I know in recent history the pledge was not done at our school. I understand that the pledge can be controversial, and I am aware of its history and know how it came into being. Because of that, this change in routine surprised some of you and caused you to be concerned. I am sorry for surprising you with this change. I respect your concerns and want to assure you that I also respect the right of any student to not participate in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. However, as I must follow the law and district policy, we will continue to include the pledge in our morning routine.
Again, I apologize for surprising you with the change in routine. Thank you for your feedback – it is always encouraged to help us do our best work in support of your student’s education. Last, I look forward to working with you this year to have a GREAT year at [the school]!
Oddly, this is now becoming a regular occurrence in my life: receiving a surprising, out of left field email from a leader – a corporate CEO, a divisional executive, a principal – which at once violates so many rules of leadership that it seems almost calculated to offend. In each case, the leader admits to making a change which is (a) made with no notice, (b) made with no concern for the impact or opinions of the affected population, (c) justified by some regulation which by their own admission appears to be interpretive at best, more likely discretionary, and certainly irrelevant or counterproductive in practice, and (d) is passed off pathetically with a chipper send-off, oozing with a cowardly hope that the controversy will all blow over and everything will be dandy tomorrow.
Making changes of any sort without notice is usually a bad idea. Even if the change is essentially not a choice, it’s always a good idea to give the veneer of optionality to a change so as to make people think that they’ve been involved. Often that’s just advance notice – hey folks, we’re doing something we haven’t done in the past, starting tomorrow, it’s the law so I can’t stop it but just wanted you to know – and that advance notice gives people the choice to prepare, to think about it. If they show up and haven’t thought about it then it’s their fault; the choice, therefore, is to think about it. But that’s a choice, at least, even if it’s a false one. Psychologically, it makes things a bit easier. Did the principal do this? No. Fists of ham.
Now, obviously, not every change in the school routine is going to be previewed with parents. My son came home and mentioned that the end of day routine had also changed: instead of all kids taking the bus home going to the cafeteria, they now congregate in a single classroom for each grade, and then a teacher brings them to the bus zone. That’s fine, and no one wants to be engaged at that level of change (although this being Seattle, someone will I’m sure have complained that her daughter’s inability to go to the cafeteria on her own is an implicit block to building her self-esteem and an example of the patriarchy limiting freedom of movement). But the Pledge of Allegiance change is not the same thing as lining up for a bus. In north Seattle, the Pledge was predictably going to be controversial. It takes no particular knowledge to realize that it is fundamentally different than who kids sit with at lunch. And yet the principal seemed to think that it was, given that she gave exactly the same weight to one change as the other in terms of expecting parental response.
As a leader, this means she either took no time to learn about the population of families who were being served by her school, or that she knew their political proclivities and didn’t care about their view, or that she knew their political proclivities and felt the best way to make things happen was to try to sneak one by them – despite the fact that she had possibly the worst co-conspirators in the world, children between the age of five and eleven, to rely upon to keep the secret. Or even worse for a public elementary school principal, she thought she was dealing with a rational group of adults who would understand that there was an unenforced and ignored law and school district policy that had not been observed but obviously needed to be. What? Assume a group of parents would be rational? That makes you insane because it is so obviously incorrect – and it now forces all of us to question whether she has any decent sense of judgment whatsoever.
Which brings us to the third failure: hiding behind rules. The weakest of moral arguments is “I was just following orders,” but as legal arguments go, it generally passes muster – and as an administrative argument, it’s almost impeccable. But that’s what makes it so pathetic as a leader: what passes as a bureaucratic necessity is morally empty. Leadership isn’t about administration; it’s about morality, exhibiting the courage to do what is right, not what is dictated. We admire leaders who are willing to discern this difference, and in fact, we end up being attracted to leaders who play-act this discernment despite our own judgments of right and wrong. We do so because of the courage required to reject dictated requirements, and we presume that that courage is accompanied by a moral notion of what is right. That is a fallacy – Nietzsche’s attempt to conflate “that which the courageous assert” with “that which is right” has been demonstrably proven false so many times that it’s tedious (if sometimes necessary) to remind us of it – but the willingness to believe in the fallacy only reveals the underlying truth. “Following orders” is universally viewed as morally bankrupt, even as it retains its value in organizational constructs; “doing what is right” is universally viewed as good, even as organizations revile the sentiment behind it, that the organization is not universally good.
For the principal – caught in the vise between district administration, union represented staff, and fundamentally insane parent clients – falling back on bureaucratic necessity is particularly false. Only the district will view it as valid – but given that they had turned a blind eye to ignoring the regulation and policy of the Pledge to date, it was clear that the principal in this case was invoking an empty administrative requirement. She was, in other words, going to die on a hill that the district had already abandoned. The union and the parents – both of Seattle, both therefore fundamentally antithetical to the Pledge and what it represents – were going to despise her for the act and even more so for invoking the bureaucrat’s last disputational resort.
This again reminded me of other settings in which I’ve found myself of late. From work – in a workplace imbued in the habits of peacetime military obfuscation and false bureaucratic duty – to just the general engagement we all have with administration, at the town level, the state level, the federal level, the international level – the willingness to cowardly hide behind “this is the law and this is what I’ve been told to do” despite the glaring reality that The Law writ large is contradictory, and what one has been told to do is patently in contradiction to the mission and the reality of what one is supposed to do by the underlying principles of The Law, is rampant. We do not live in a world of false news: we live in an era of false principles, and in an environment – much like the interwar era of Franz Kafka, and Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth; of John Dos Passos and H.L. Mencken; of the postwar era of Joseph Heller and Mordecai Richter – of absurdity and of a lazy willingness to accept the judgment and fundamental exhaustion of responsibility of the organization, at the expense of the intuition and individual accountability of the self. My son’s principal, in her pathetic and strange first email to parents, embodied it all.
And to close it off with have a “GREAT year” at the school – despite hiding behind pathetic an unenforced regulations, despite ignoring the sensibilities of all the constituencies to whom she had some accountability, despite making what can only be seen as a significant change with no notice and thus without even a modicum of professional discretion – simply adds insult to injury. Again, I compare it to my own professional experience – this is neither surprising nor unusual; rather it is boring, normal. It’s what I’ve encountered at all the companies by which I’ve been employed; only rare individual leaders have bucked the trend. Lately I’ve encountered fewer and fewer such leaders, and when I’ve tried to act as what I think of as a proper leader, not just an administrator, I’ve encountered the full force of what a bureaucratic culture can bring to bear. But the life of a republic – the promise of both liberty and justice, in a world in which such concepts should be available to all, in a sense making us all indivisible as a human species, on a small world which is indivisible without our consequent destruction – demands that we continue to be courageous, that we continue to ignore administrative imperatives in the name of the good. In other words, we can, Viktoria, have a robust argument about the nature of that Good – whether it is beauty, or truth, or justice – and whether there can ever be a singular good.
Oddly, though, the Great Kerfuffle of 2019 will probably produce something different. This being north Seattle, the general reaction is to fragment. My ex-wife is on a Facebook group site on which like-minded parents are trading stories of their own agony in facing the falsehoods behind the Pledge. A Mexican parent sees current immigration policy as an affront; others recount their experiences as minorities and recoil from the implications of the homogeneity behind the Pledge’s founding principals. Instead of uniting behind a message of “this administrator is incompetent,” the emerging theme is to fragment the community behind two opposing and equally false viewpoints. One group views the Pledge as a fundamentally good thing, and those that don’t see it as being anti-American – even in north Seattle, there are a lot of “patriotic” Americans who see symbols as sacrosanct. And the other views the Pledge as being symbolic of the vague fascism that comes with nationalism, that is willing to associate personal slights experienced as black / immigrant / LGBTQ people by mainstream society with one of the symbols of that mainstream. Both therefore endow a symbol – a thirty-one word rote bad poem recited hand over heart to a piece of fabric – with meaning. If we’re going to care about the Pledge, then the administrator has a kind of duty to pay attention to the regulations – if you don’t like it, change the law. If we don’t care about it, though, the Pledge becomes meaningless and empty… but north Seattlites are too earnest to see that possibility. So both sides harden, crystalize, and miss the point.
Both abdicate their ability to do what my classmates, teachers, administrators, and community did in the 80s, which is to render the symbol powerless via a collective will to ignore. The principal at my son’s school wants to reinstate it? The best way to render it powerless is to not care. It’s to take the principal’s desire to “do something” as the ravings of a pathetic, powerless, and cowardly administrator with less leadership skill than my seven year old son. The potential of a community is to make symbols, any symbol but especially the ones imposed by faceless institutions, meaningless through disdain – but by taking the administrators and their symbols seriously we lose that power. We have lost the collective ability to ignore – and that may be the greatest danger we face as a liberal democratic civilization. We need to be able to collectively not care.
Ironically, my company’s values includes “loyalty,” which I’ve thought about a lot lately. I’ve come to realize that loyalty is the polar opposite of allegiance: loyalty is earned, every day, while allegiance can only be demanded and forced. I learned loyalty to the republic, for the flag for which it stands, by inverting the notion of allegiance and coming to value the principles on which the republic was founded (even if the practical outcomes were imperfect, to say the least), the statements of the Supreme Court (well, most of them – Dred Scott is only one of many cringeworthy abominations), the best moments of liberty and justice that it can produce – and realizing that that loyalty required my ability to challenge the republic, to reject its falsehoods when they came about. Loyalty is being true to what is right in a mission; it is not blind. I hope my son learns the same. And if the result is that he is a bit impudent, that he’s a bit iconoclastic, that he maybe crosses the line into disrespect: well, he’ll be his father’s son. He’ll be loved no matter what.