Padron Calls Out Bureaucracy in Charleston County School District

From Atlantic magazine of 2012, congruent with the Charleston County School District's adding more layers of bureaucracy:

"This is why we must bulldoze school bureaucracy. It is a giant diversion, focused on compliance to please some administrator far away. Every minute spent filling out a form or worrying about compliance interferes with the human interaction that is the essence of effective teaching."

"Law is everywhere in schools. It permeates every nook and cranny. Teachers spend hours every week filling out forms that no one ever reads -- because the laws and regulations that have piled up over the years require them. Hardly any interaction is free of legal implications. Teachers are instructed never -- never ever -- to put an arm around a crying child: the school might get sued. Misbehavior and disrespect are met with weakness and resignation; teachers are trained to be stoics, tolerating disorder rather than running the risk of a "due process" hearing in which the teacher, not the student, must justify her decision. "

"Principals suffer a similar inversion of authority with teachers, who are armed with hundreds of pages of work rules that prescribe exactly what teachers can be asked to do. Managing a school -- say, setting the hours, deciding how to spend the budget, and deciding which teachers are doing the job -- is an oxymoron. Public schools today are, by law, basically unmanageable."

Sound familiar? It probably does to school board candidate and former principal Paul Padron. At a recent candidate forum, he made the following remarks:

" the bureaucracy at the 75 Calhoun Street headquarters was the root of the student achievement problem in Charleston County School District (CCSD). Pardon said, '75 Calhoun is like an island. There is a moat around the island. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Teachers are afraid to ask for help. Everything gets stuck in the bureaucracy.'” 

"Padron, who served as the principal in three different CCSD schools, said teachers and principals are not listened to or given the support they need. He said, 'The top-down approach we have is not working.'” No kidding!

"He told Lowcountry Source that the authoritarian climate in CCSD reminded him of his native 
Cuba."

Discouraging, isn't it?

Maybe CCSD needs to change.