K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
According to the ERS survey, the mean of average salaries for superintendents of schools this year is $148,387, up 5.1 percent over last year and 46.2 percent over 1997-1998. "It has improved over the last few years because it's market-driven. The shortage of superintendents drives compensation up a bit, and school boards are aware that to hold on to the ones they have, they have to compensate them better," says Paul Houston, former executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. "It's always been sort of a lightning rod position. You're the one at the top of the system and you're pulled in all directions."
Besides limited funding, superintendents say a major stress of the job is the politics of dealing with multiple constituencies with often different agendas, including parents, their own school boards, and state legislators.
"It's more political now than I ever guessed it would be. I didn't anticipate being as involved as I am with policy change at the state level. It takes time away from my day-to-day responsibilities," says Matt Miller, superintendent of the Celina (Ohio) City Schools.
"There are too many political issues," adds Lanny Tibaldo, superintendent of the West De Pere (Wis.) School District. "We're overly mandated by our state and the federal government. They demand so much time, and in the 38 years I have been in education, I haven't seen many of these mandates work."
INSTRUCTIONAL AND CURRICULUM DIRECTORS
With a mean of average salaries of $99,748, up 5 percent from the year before, administrators responsible for instructional services say they face challenges underscored by federal and state mandates like No Child Left Behind and Adequate Yearly Progress standards.
NCLB forces instructional service directors to focus on the academic needs of every student and study student-by-student progress. "The problem is that the administrative burden (time and paperwork) that comes with it is beyond anything that is reasonable," says Laurie McCullough, director of instructional services in the Waynesboro (Va.) Public Schools and president of the Virginia affiliate of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
Further, she says, "it seems at times that there's a gap between the teaching we are doing to satisfy the mandates and the teaching we are doing to prepare kids for their lives after school." She cites both blue- and white-collar employers who say "they don't need people who are carrying around a lot of facts in their brains. They need people who are flexible thinkers and know how to fi nd and evaluate information and use it to solve a problem."
Employers in her area who need people like that range from a Hershey candy manufacturing facility and Wal-Mart distribution center to the University of Virginia and James Madison University with their large numbers of office workers and managers, health care aides, and other types of positions, McCullough says.
Bhavna Sharma-Lewis, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction in the Addison (Ill.) School District, says her decisions are driven as well by the needs of her diverse student population, including the 56 percent of students who are English Language Learners. "So a lot of our curriculum decisions are based on what kind of vocabulary, what kind of support they need in order to succeed," she says.
That support, she adds, often includes "a lot of the social and emotional pieces" that students need because of their sometimes challenging home environments. It has become like character education, according to Sharma-Lewis. "The demands of our society require educators to focus on the 'whole' child in his or her development and learning and not just the academics of school," she says. "With many homes having two parents who work, and/or single parent families, the schools have to focus more on teaching and providing a foundation for social, emotional and behavior expectations and standards."
FINANCE AND BUSINESS OFFICERS
The ERS survey found that the mean of average salaries for district finance and business directors is $96,490, 5.2 percent above the 2006-2007 level and 42.5 percent higher than in 1997-1998. Administrators in these positions say tight district budgets underscore much of their work these days, which includes cutting programs and services. "The cuts are being made in things like music and art, where there may not be mandates. Elementary school kids who maybe were having music three times a week now might get it once a week," says John Musso, executive director of the Association of School Business Officers International.
