Was I a Bad Teacher?

If you work in any type of management position long enough, you will hear about the Peter Principle. It's the idea that if you are good at your job, you will continue to be promoted until you are no longer good at your job. You rise to your level of incompetence and then stay there. Promotions are generally given to people that excel in their field and eventually, that means that you manage other people that do the job that you used to do. Unfortunately, there is no correlation between performing a job skill and leading or managing a team. In fact, the opposite is generally true instead. So in our world, if you want to advance as an educator, or you want to make more money, that generally means you leave teaching and become an administrator. But outside of helping here and there with instruction, not much of what I did as a teacher has anything to do with what I do as a principal. In fact, according to the research, chances are that if I am a good principal, there's a greater chance that I wasn't that good as a teacher. The jobs are just that different. 

But what about all of the teachers that do a great job, like what they do, but want to find ways to be paid well or promoted based on their work? Shouldn't there be something out there that keeps this expertise in teaching? A group in our state has been working on a proposal and this week, I had an opportunity to hear more about it and to talk with some legislators that are trying to make it happen. (You can read much more about it here.) It is an interesting proposition, and one that pays educators based on what they do rather than their years of service. It is also fluid from year to year, so a teacher can step back when they need to and advance when they want to. If you take a minute to read up on it, I'd love to have your feedback. It is the beginning of a conversation about how to fix the teacher pipeline and how to adequately pay teachers for their work and while we may not have all of the wrinkles ironed out yet, it's good that we are having the conversation. Especially if that conversation means that good teachers can find a way to stay in the classroom.

Now I guess I just need to come to terms with some hard truths. If I am considered a good principal, that either means I beat the odds and happen to have been a good teacher, or perhaps I wasn't that good in the first place. Or maybe I was a good teacher, and I've risen to my level of incompetence. Either way, it's a good thing I have plenty of good teachers around me to make up for it.