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toxic
By audhill | November 10, 2007
Miguel Guhlin writes about career suicide. He wonders if a person should act out of their integrity and move from a position even at the expense of their career.
Well…. How do you really know when is it time to leave a place? When is it better to take a stand and when is it best to leave? Having left places before, I know that it is always better to run TO something than to run FROM something. Is it the place or the institution that needs leaving? Can you tell which is which?
I left a school once (years back now) . In this particular situation, a great principal left for another job. In the ensuing vacuum, powerful, toxic people took over and began actively practicing a politics of division, dismantling the trust and teamwork of a whole school. Systems fell apart, and people started leaving left and right. When I decided to leave, there were some who accused me of being a traitor, who felt (wrongly) that I should have tolerated the environment, even accepted it as my due, or that I should have tried harder to curry favor with the powerful ones. Some others thought I should have stayed for the children’s sake and worked for change. I knew differently. Maybe there was something I could have done or said. Maybe if I had been stronger and more willing to confront the sickness as it spread, I could have stayed. But… I didn’t, because this also is true: you don’t have to stay with a batterer, and you don’t have to work with them, either. Sometimes, it’s time to go.
In that particular case, the people made the place toxic. But.. it isn’t always the people. Sometimes the bureaucracy itself can be the poison. The educational bureaucracy is, by it’s very nature, an unwieldy, paper logged, political monolith. It services a large underage clientele of varying degrees of academic, physical, and social/emotional readiness. And, it is beset on all sides by legal rangling, political infighting, limited resources, administrative mismanagement, teacher burnout, conflicting theories in practice, crazy making parents, and raging culture wars.
Can we make wholesale changes to such an institution? I don’t know. From what I can see, systems that are broken down are rarely replaced by something better, at least not in the shortrun. I’ve certainly seen idealists get their heads bashed in because what they thought was so obvious and intuitive wasn’t. People who have only seen a small portion of the system… teachers, middle management administrators, parents, university professors and theorists… I’m not so sure that they really have enough insight to know where to run TO.
For myself? I have two questions: Can I accomplish what I’m trying to accomplish where I am and are there people I can work with? And if I can’t and there aren’t, where and with whom would I be able to accomplish it? I suspect that smaller is better and I often think that I would flourish in a smaller setting, where the bureaucracy was smaller and the human element more pronounced.
Miguel’s friend who is leaving for a different district… hoping that things will be different there. …If he’s leaving an untenable situation for a better place , bless him. If he’s hoping that the bureaucracy will be non existent somewhere else, I wonder if he doesn’t find that, on that score, there is nowhere to go. You either work with it, or you don’t.
Topics: education |