Administrators should also be teachers.

The problem with educational leadership is this:

Every step on the career ladder takes a person farther and farther away from students.

If you want a higher salary, greater responsibility, an elevated title, and everything else that comes with leading a school or a school district, you must spend your time primarily in the company of adults.

The higher you climb, the greater the distance from the individuals who matter the most:

Kids.

As students change, pedagogy evolves, and our communities undergo enormous economic, cultural, and sociological changes, administrators observe from afar.

They stop teaching.

In some cases, they stop teaching for decades, yet they continue to make decisions that impact the classroom in profound ways. They assess teacher performance. Make critical curricular decisions. Determine the direction of their school.

It’s never made a lick of sense to me.

I thought the same thing while managing McDonald’s restaurants. In order to climb that corporate ladder, you had to move farther and farther away from the profit centers of the company:

The restaurants.

Also never made a lick of sense to me.

This is not to say that school administrators don’t perform well despite their distances from students. I’ve known many administrators who lead with expertise, integrity, empathy, and ingenuity. I’ve also known some who work hard to keep in touch with students by involving themselves in student government, athletics, the theater, and more.

I have worked for some extraordinary leaders in my 23 years of teaching. Truly gifted and inspiring people.

But could they have been even better had they remained a little closer to students? Stayed in better touch with the realities of the classroom? Kept one foot in the trenches?

I think maybe so.

Last week, I was consulting with schools in San Fransisco and found myself working with a district that requires all administrators to teach in the classroom for at least one hour each week and monitor at least one recess or lunch period every week, without exception.

Brilliant.

Every school district should do this.

I suspect that the information gleaned from preparing and teaching lessons and monitoring children in less structured environments would guide their leadership decisions in profound ways.

I’m sure the argument would be made that administrators are too busy to surrender two hours of their week to this exercise, but that, of course, is ridiculous.

The investment in time would pay off enormously, but more important, no administrator’s time is too precious to spend a couple hours per week with kids.