How many times have we heard at some staff meeting or professional development that we need to “change the culture”?  Well, that depends as to how long you’ve been teaching, regardless of your district.  Unless you are lucky enough to have avoided revolving door administration and their obsession with eduspeak, you have more than likely heard your fair share of paradigm-shifting rhetoric.

What’s really insulting about this is that you will often hear this from a brand-new set of administration every two or three years who seem to think that we have been doing anything but.  It’s as if they believe that we as educators have been sitting around for 5, 10, 20, or even 30+ years just waiting for them to show up to a meeting and tell us that we need to change the culture.  This, of course, after telling teachers that the district is broke while having themselves received a raise during some July board meeting.

Much like the phrase “students first,” administration will use whatever words, terms, and slogans that they learned during their one year of taking administrative credentialing classes at some online, for-profit university to make it sound as if they’re actually in the know when it comes to what is needed for student success.  But if you’ve been doing this long enough, or even if you haven’t, you can see right through their gibberish, because you know full well that they are just using their current site as a stepping stone for them to use to get to some other, higher-paying position with a nice car and cell phone allowance.

If your district is anything like mine, district cabinet-members will ingratiate your school site with an occasional visit about once every four to six weeks, usually looking for something to nitpick on as a “focus area for growth” or some other such term that allows them to demonstrate to the board that they are worth the six-figure salary that they earn get.

So what were the bullet points of cabinet’s second walkthrough this year?  Well, just look at the pyramid at the top and you will see the three areas of what our cabinet believes to be “culture changing,” and which we all received in an email after their last visit—this coming from a set of people that have been in the district for less time than ninety percent of the teachers.

As far as the using of technology is concerned in regards to their last visit, the specific piece of technology that they were focusing on were the microphones that “the district bought for you to use”.  For starters, and as usual, no one actually asked any teachers if they needed a microphone to use in their rooms.  Most teachers have relatively small classrooms that do not merit the need for a microphone, as although most of us have 150+ students, they’re not actually all there at the same time.  If they really wanted to change the culture, they might consider spending that money on hiring more teachers instead of trying to turn them into public-address systems…

Of course, being able to change a culture means actually being part of it—and when it comes to the RADs who make posters and proclamations in the hopes of making a difference… well, the actual struggle doing so is absolutely unknown to them.

This example of what district leaders believe to be cultural changing does nothing more than exemplify the ignorance of your typical, revolving-door administration and also demonstrates what little they know about the actual education process as opposed to the theoretical of which they are all “experts”.  They simply do not understand that repeating something that they heard in one of their education classes, read it in a book or, more than likely, heard it at a conference doesn’t mean it will automatically happen, nor do they understand that something hasn’t already been happening just because they have not been here to witness it.