You will get better teachers and administrators if your organization has the ability to make employees accountable and the power to make changes. If you throw up your hands and say "it is a bottomless pit" then schools will not improve. NYC has tons of incompetent teachers sitting in "rubber rooms" because they can not get rid of them. All too often the teachers band together to protect themselves from bad administrators and end up protecting bad teachers. International schools have a lot of former public school teachers who bring the culture with them and then are shocked when they are held accountable or simply dismissed with no formal process.

My previous reply was in response to psyguy

Well maybe I have a different idea of what collaboration is from you. However, administrators decide certain things and salary and who gets hired are two of the main things. Administrators are responsible for the budget not teachers. If an administrator is responsible for the budget, they need to have the power to control the budget. Responsibility without power is absurd. This is not being a dictator, just the most efficient way to run any organization. Teachers are always concerned (and rightly so) with administrators run amuk. Teachers want to have a hand in the evaluation process to prevent bad administrator decisions. What happens is then the administrator can't do their job and get rid of bad teachers. The solution is not more controls or teacher involvement but rather better administrators. Education is a fairly unique industry where the employees feel (and often do) have input into these types of administrator decisions. Teachers can leave if they don't like it. What other industry allows bad employees to hang around for months (at a minimum) and often years? Considering teachers work with our most precious resource (children) we should have higher standards not lower. Overall, there are too many bad teachers and too many bad administrators out there. They both need more accountability. They both need more mobility.

I am a bit amazed at the vindictive and immature nature of some of the admin reviews. Maybe it is the angry people are the ones that write reviews and the positive people are too busy doing their job.

I see reviews about "top down" decisions and other buzz words where it appears that the teacher just does not agree with a decision(s). Expecting a salary scale to be a collaborative decision is one example of absurdity.

Sometimes I worry that I was that immature and arrogant when I started teaching...maybe I was.