Administration Remystified

"Administration" is not a highly admired occupation. "Anybody can do it." Yes, but very few can do it well. Good administrators are as hard to find as good managers, good leaders, etc.

It's some sort of an optical illusion. Thinking casually about an "administration" job may bring to mind the shuffling of paper, drinking of tea and other such glorious activities. But there are reason to suspect that there is more to this job. An MBA - Master of Business Administration - is a well respected degree. Surely not for the tea-drinking. The government is responsible for they administration of the mechanisms of the state. In many countries, this alone is enough to give the citizen a healthy sense of how badly this can be done. This can help us draw a conclusion that administration is a real job, and anyone doing it well deserves recognition, and even admiration.

The administration facility has to make the system work. There are the standard issues of salaries to paid employees, routing budgets for projects, maintaining communication lines, and generally making sure the rules are being followed. Any hiccup in any of these can bring the system down. Any inefficiency, overzelousness or confusion between goals and means, can leave the system functioning but unbearable. This is the normal case for large systems. The education system in any country is a large system.

Here are a few glorious tasks for the administration in the context of education:

Managing plans: Making sure the planning and financing is for the long term. With research, it is easy to let too much of the budget be used for the initial research, leaving too little for the follow up. This is even worse than leaving nothing for the follow-up, since badly performed research can cause harm, while skipped research can only miss an opportunity to have positive impact. When financing equipment, it is easy to forget the financing of maintenance. A very good - and expensive - computer class can fall into disrepair very quickly if it is not maintained properly. Similarly, when planning teacher training for new methods or the use of new equipment, it is imperative to plan for repeat training: Teachers leave, new teachers arrive, tasks change, tools change, etc. The administrative apparatus can and must reign in the visionaries, leaders and politicians, and make sure plans are viable in the long run, in terms of finance and action plans. This is not to say that the administration takes the place of the professional researchers, trainers, etc. It does mean that the administration is responsible for planning correctly - a distinctly separate discipline.

Managing communication: Research results and conclusions should be distributed to all the end-points of the education system. Sometimes to teachers, sometimes to principals, sometimes to officials of various levels. Information from the field - problems, opportunities and innovations - should be collected and reach the decision-makers and researchers. Teachers should be able to consult with their peers. Pupils should be able to reach their teachers. All these connections, and others, can be easily clogged. As a mundane example, consider a situation where the population of a certain school grows, so the school opens a new class. There is no budget and time for building a new structure, so the school joins a few small rooms into a new classroom. Looks like a good solution, but now the teachers don't have a place to sit one-on-one with students who have problems. A venue of teacher-pupil communication is clogged. Who should notice the issue and provide a solution, an alternative or a preventive measure? The wise administrator!

Managing a paid volunteer workforce: Salaries are not great. At least the system must work smoothly, so teachers know they are taken seriously. No room for delays in payments. No room for complex salary structure that obscures the value of the work. Clear financial and non-financial incentives and disincentives. No room for a bureaucracy that requires a struggle to get anything done when an employee should get something from the system. No room for a bureaucracy that requires a struggle to get anything done when an employee (or volunteer) wants to give something to the system.

Managing an unpaid volunteer workforce: This is not yet the situation, but an education system has much to gain from harnessing the good will of the parents and the public at large. Managing volunteers is the same as managing the paid volunteers, only more so: Volunteers must know they ate taken seriously, and that they can do good, without wasting efforts on bureaucracy.

Align authority and responsibility: This is true for every organization, and the leadership of any healthy organization states it as a basic rule. If an official is responsible for achieving a goal, they have to have the authority to make the decisions that can make that achievement. And vice versa: If an official has an authority to make a decision, they have the responsibility to do it right and they are accountable of anything goes wrong on their watch. This is very clear in theory, and very difficult in practice. Broadly speaking (as I always do), everybody likes autrhority and nobody likes responsibility, and certainly not accountability. In education systems there are many opportunities for misalignment of authority and responsibility. A few examples from an education system with which I am familiar: Schools and teachers are responsible for the smooth ruining of the lessons they teach, but they have no clear authority to remove a chronically disruptive pupil from the school. Principals are responsible for the education of the students in their school, but they have no authority to remove a bad teacher from the school.

Many other aspects include: Managing and aligning law-making, managing teacher education, keeping in touch with the various stakeholders: Government, teachers, pupils, parents and the public at large. A comprehensive discussion would take at least a book, and would probably be an eternal job. But another specific aspect should bind them all:

Know the limitations of the rules: The administration described above is very powerful and very skilled. It has tools and rules, which enable it to function. The most difficult demand of this administration is for it to be wise. To go beyond the rules and formal job descriptions. To see the goals of the organization, and when there is a contradiction between the two, give the goals precedence over the rules. If this happens too often, it may mean that the rules need changing. But if such a contradiction between goals and rules happens only occasionally - that's ok. Rules can be expected to define only a rough route towards the goals, and even good rules sometimes need to be tempered by wisdom.