How Does This Work?

Someone is going to have to explain to me how hiring a head from a private company is going to make the slightest bit of difference when everything else everyone does in the institution that is school is dictated by central office? Just exactly how has this new sparkly head not got his hands tied just like any other bog-standard principal?

Perhaps I'm missing something here and he will indeed be let loose to employ a large number of immensely gifted people who see themselves as facilitators rather than teachers, with the aim of achieving a reasonable staff-pupil ratio so that they can all get about doing that personalized learning stuff which the government keep promising. Perhaps he can buck the Nat Curriculum and deliver the information that the pupils actually seek, whilst having the disciplinary skill to *offer* theories rather than to insist upon them, in such a way as to reflect the best possible practice in theories of knowledge, be they scientific or otherwise. Yeah, come on, I don't think so.

Anyhow it's not as if competition doesn't already exist in that particular job market, even if it is with other employees of the state, so how could this niggly teeny-winsy bit of competition make the slightest odds in all this? Hmm? The head will still has a captive market, (well nominally, bar all the exclusions and truants, more on which later), he will still have to attempt to force the national curriculum into all those brains, however inappropriate this may be for their learning needs, and however woeful an epistemological theory this may rest upon. Go here for a better one.

Oh, hang on, perhaps there wasn't any competition for headships after all. Right, so no adult in the right minds, and without a substantial remunerative offer would consider working in these sorts of places, which means that we have to shell out bundles of cash to a private firm, and it seems even these aren't exactly queueing up, since we have to hoick someone in from the States to do it. Paying someone a reasonable inducement to do something is not the same as introducing genuine competition into the market, if no competition steps up to the plate. Really the situation must be quite bad if no-one in this country wants this sort of a job.

And yet we still expect all those swathes of children to go to these places every day their lives, no financial inducements whatsoever.