This statement leads to a consideration of the second group of people who have to do with the school organization. The schools could not get on without trained teachers. There was a time when each parent taught his own child. That was in the days when there wasn’t much to teach. To-day the parent places his child in the care of a specialist. The parent has come to the specialist because the parent has confidence that the specialist knows how to take care of the children. Teachers are not mere hirelings and nurses, inferior to the children; teachers are trained specialists.
As the system grows more complex there appear several classes of specialists—some who know how to deal with the pupils, some who know how to provide the children with proper seats and proper ventilation, some who know how to make courses of study, and some who keep the records of the schools.
Furthermore, the school system grows complicated on the material side. Buildings have to be erected and cared for. Land has to be evaluated and cared for. Some people think that all this is an open book to everyone who is in business. The fact is that knowledge of school equipment is just as highly specialized knowledge as knowledge of railroad equipment. A wholesale grocer would not think of himself as competent to estimate the cost of Pullman cars just because he knows about business. The better school systems now have accounting methods in schools which bring out such matters as the cost per unit of teaching in high schools and elementary schools, the standard cost of instruction in different subjects, and the cost of school equipments as related to their sanitary and hygienic fitness.
Every complete school system has its business interests in the hands of competent specialists who know about school costs in detail and in particular.
MAKING THE MACHINE WORK SMOOTHLY
By the time a school system reaches the point where it has all these specialists, it becomes necessary to give much attention to the central planning of a scheme of operation which shall make the whole machine work smoothly. There must be a central office where management is provided. In setting up this central office there has been a great deal of experimenting. Sometimes a teacher has been put in charge; sometimes a board member, in such case the president of the board has taken charge. Some years ago the city of Cleveland tried the experiment of putting a business manager in charge. This business manager appointed the superintendent of instruction. If one goes back into the history of Chicago, he finds that a business manager to take charge of school lands was appointed two years before the superintendent of instruction was appointed.
Gradually out of all the experimenting there has arisen a new type of school officer, a superintendent of schools who is a trained school manager. This manager does not teach; he does not shovel coal into the furnaces in the schools; he does exactly what the head of any great corporation does; he organizes the undertaking. He must know human nature; he must know how to get reports; he must know how to tell the people about the needs of their schools; he must know how to straighten out tangles; and he must know how to judge results. This manager must give his whole time to getting the machinery to work and keeping it in order.
In a large school system the manager’s office will be subdivided and there will need to be some further organization to keep it from falling apart. There will be one person in such an office who will know more about heating school buildings and one who will know about the quality of teaching. The more the subdivision the more precautions necessary to hold all parts of the system together.[25]
Report of Committee of Superintendents
Another recent document which throws much light on the problem of the relation between school officers is a report presented to the Department of Superintendence, a division of the National Education Association. This report opens with extracts from a number of letters from superintendents in all parts of the country. The discussion then proceeds as follows:
OBSOLETE ADMINISTRATION SYSTEM
The impression which a careful study of this material [referring to the material upon which the report is based] makes on one’s mind is the painful one that most administrative situations are undefined and shifting. Schools are administered, sometimes well, sometimes badly, but in most cases without clear definition of responsibility or authority. Public interests are fortunately protected in most instances, but the machinery is the primitive machinery of the vigilance committee, with now the superintendent, now the board of education, now the city council, now a parents’ association, trying to determine what steps shall be taken to promote public welfare.
STATUS OF SUPERINTENDENCY VARIES
In such a situation the accidents of personal influence play an unjustifiable part. Several of the letters from successful superintendents state explicitly or show between the lines that they are entirely in control of the policies of the schools. Some go so far as to say that any effort to define the responsibilities and authority of the superintendent would curtail their influence and would therefore be undesirable. At the other end of the scale are reports which show that the superintendent is shorn of all influence. In many cases he is little more than a clerk, dependent from day to day on the accidents of the board’s attitude for the meager authority which he tries to exercise. In some cases he goes to the board meeting only when especially invited. He has teachers sent to him by the board, and he knows nothing about the financial management of the system. Such a superintendent usually recommends the adoption of a state law endowing his office with rights.
The extreme situations referred to above may occur within a single state, showing that there is no such thing as a typical and clearly defined American school administration.