During a ritualized team building exercise at the beginning of the school year an interesting assertion of power occurred when the principal was trying to encourage a spirit of teamwork. He was giving an example of why agreed upon policy standards were more effective when everyone on the team was “on the same page”. His example was the no hats policy which immediately got a tittering response from all the teachers who were wearing hats at the time and which set up a humorous remark from the principal about the immediate exception to the rule while we were having our professional development session. He cited the reason for the rule as being for security purposes because hats and hoods make it harder to ID a student who is acting out. He further stated that this, like many of the decisions made in prior years, was a good one because we know from experience that it works. At this point my reaction as a team member became “I don’t buy it.”
The principal is a logical and detail oriented leader but from my point of view he has some unfortunate blind spots. He is lacking a critical understanding of the dynamics of the dominant culture as demonstrated by his presentation of team building. Without that understanding he is incapable of assuming a stable premise. Without a stable premise, all the logic in the world will not deliver the truth. He was seemingly unaware that his statement about prior decision making was dis-empowering to the new staff who did not participate in the discussion he described the staff having had many years ago and thus the new staff’s opinions were unknown and thoroughly disregarded. He seemed unbothered by the fact that he was contradicting his statements about consistency by not having a consistent standard for assuring that social justice remains the focus for all that we do since he also stated that was one of our top priorities. He seemed ignorant of the irony that he was asserting the power of the dominant culture as a member of it by emphasizing a decision that entails innumerable cultural elements, many that vary greatly from the dominant cultural norm and that in doing so he was not acting for social justice but instead he was acting to assert class stratification.
There’s a lot to chew on in this little sequence but first I want to explain why I’m not buying the no hats policy itself; then I’ll go on to further deconstruct the assertion of power.
The security argument is bogus. The school is equipped with security cameras, so any unsanctioned activity is always monitored. As social animals we have multiple innate tools for recognizing individuals beyond facial recognition. We also know that the human animal uses hearing, touch and smell to identify each other. We are better equipped than most animals to use psychology too. The significance of this is that at our school we pride ourselves in our dedication to getting to know our students. Granted eyewitnesses are unreliable but at 950 students we don’t have such a large group that hats and hoods do a thorough job of disguising our students from us.
Since an important part of our interaction with students is getting to know why individual students present themselves the way they do, what is the point of asserting the rule other than to assert power over them? I believe we should not be trying to compel students to fit a standard set by the dominant culture. At all. Especially since their personal expression is often at odds with adult expectations and naturally so. This age group needs to learn to challenge adult authority and should be included in the decision making process. I believe we should be helping students become more like who they really are, encouraging their natural abilities, celebrating their heritage, while exposing them to new experiences. Making them comply to a rule that was decided a long time ago, without their consent, just because it is championed by an exemplar of the dominant culture, is wrong. But this is only one level of the assertion of power, that of the institution over the student. In the long run, the rule itself is not as important as establishing the protocols of power. The principal’s session was an effort to establish that for the staff.
The overarching level of power that was also being demonstrated is the neoliberal agenda of school reform which includes testing students into a stupor. The main focus of our school is raising test scores as was stated at another session in this year’s teacher orientation. By pronouncing the hat rule good because it was a tried and true example of our “agreed upon policy standards”, any other policy is equally as good and just as non-debatable. Arguing against any policy is not being a team player and therefore critical thinking is actually discouraged when questioning the validity of something like standardized testing or a hat policy. And all the while he was soliciting new ideas from the staff.~
This doesn’t feel like a healthy model or environment for deep learning. But it might produce a compliant workforce for the corporate workplace.
