COMMENTARY
A good bulletin board keeps 'nats' away

By Walt Novak

Well, some sort of national accreditation team is coming to inspect schools in the Leeward District. So teachers are given waiver days, rounded up and coached on how to fool the "nats" when they arrive.

Special district DOE geniuses present "mock interview scenarios." Apparently, the important thing is to have a certain type of bulletin board. The nats like that, we're told.

Yes, the nats are so doggone clever they can tell the actual worth of an educator just by the appearance of the bulletin board!

Historically, public education in Hawai'i has always relied on shields to deflect criticism. Overhead projector lessons were going to solve the '70s. Group work was going to aid the '80s. When someone threw a critical beam at schools in the '90s, the DOE would deflect it with "but we're examining solutions via cooperative learning."

Then, after that, it was SCBM, or school-community based management.

Now it's a bulletin board.

Of course, that's too simplistic. So someone has determined that these boards need to be titled "standards walls."

Supposedly, the nats like that.

While the students stayed home watching Jerry Springer, we educators were called to a meeting to learn other important items. Teachers should all read and reread a vacuous 141-page booklet entitled "Our School's Accreditation Report." Sitting in that meeting, I had a hard time keeping track of which plane of misconstrued reality we were referring to. Nonsense was fluctuating too fast. My cerebrum was getting whiplash.

But I sat still, like a good little sheep. And I've learned my lesson about having opinions, especially about expressing them in print. One day, under a different administration, I showed up at the beginning of a new year to discover that I'd be teaching all my English classes in the cafeteria! Yup. But not my homeroom. No sir. Homeroom I'd be teaching out on a field. Under some trees.

The important thing is not opinions but bulletin boards.

Look out! The nats are coming!

So some schools are conducting an entire week of "mock runs."

Educators have been warned. We won't know when, we won't know why, but sometime during mock week, we'll be visited by a team and we will be observed. Yes.

And it's very important that we have our "rituals and routines" exactly the way we've been told.

We'd better! The nats need to pass our schools! This, needless to say, despite some being run into the ground by administrators who are detrimental to the entire community and professionalism in general. Passing is the important thing.

So an effective facade is key. Some administrators in the Leeward District are telling entire faculties that nat week "is not the time to air dirty laundry." Hmm ... that makes sense. Our public school system is absolutely riddled with administrators who mostly care about keeping unpleasant work off their desks, who willfully rig systems whereby the unpleasantness is dumped back upon the actual educators.

"Teacher-unfriendly" seems to be the guiding structural design. Many schools are rowdy institutions in which teachers are afraid of their students, their students' parents and their students' rights. The students themselves are often afraid of nothing. And why should they be? They possess powerful advocates who defend their disruptiveness right there on campus!

They're known as administrators. Handling discipline is problematic. Better to just dump it back on the teachers.

The other thing administrators often care about is creating the veneer that they're doing an excellent job. This takes skill. Illusions aren't easy.

My question is: Why in the world should a school pass a national inspection when an attending student may cut class 20 times with no administrative consequence? Oh, and he can be tardy 100 times (literally).

Oh, and he can scream vile profanities hourly as well as swear directly at his teacher. Here's why the school should pass: The ingratiating coffee klatches are superb.

And the bulletin boards are brilliant.

Walt Novak has taught in Hawai'i's public schools since 1981.