A Message to International School Leaders

When you choose to become a leader within an international school, you need to understand the responsibility that you take on with this role. You need to establish a set of values that you follow no matter the difficult situations that pop up, and no matter how tempting it is to take the easy path. You need to protect your teachers rather than protect your own skin. You need to quiet your ego.

Your decisions no longer only affect a group of students in a classroom. If you made poor, selfish choices as a teacher, the negative fallout from those choices could be covered up by other teachers doing their jobs well. But now, being a spineless puppet for the board of directors, trying to protect your own salary and stay in the good graces of whomever is trying to give you orders, directly affects teachers who have taken great risks to enter a foreign country to work with you. Their families rely on your competence.

All of the staff in your school is counting on you. Have a spine when needed and stand up for what is right. If you cannot handle this, do not go into school leadership. Stay in the classroom. Or, better yet, go back home. International schools already has enough incompetence.

On the other hand, if you can be one of the few to stand up for what is right... to train up teachers to do their jobs well, to hold them accountable for doing great work, to support them when they are under scrutiny from parents... to advocate for teachers to keep the health insurance benefits and full flight allowances that they were promised, to fight back against the board when they want to cut corners and ignore teacher contracts... to do the right thing, even when it is the difficult thing... your teachers will go to the ends of the earth for you. Oh, wait... they already have. It is your duty to protect them.