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Friendly Advice for Administrators By Royal Van Horn Illustration © 1998 by Mario Noche

FIRST a disclaimer. We are all dumb in different categories. I know almost nothing about the administration of anything at any level. Nor do I want to. I often joke by saying that I don't even like administrators! Of course, some of my best friends are administrators, but the ones who are not my friends often misconstrue my contrarian comments. I do try to stay away from buildings and offices that house a lot of administrators, and I try to avoid all those meetings that administrators seem to like so much.

While I don't know anything about administration, I've still spent millions of dollars on behalf of administrators in designing, installing, configuring, maintaining, and operating a multitude of workstations, servers, networks, telecommunications devices, software, and so on. After doing this kind of work for more than a decade now, I have this first piece of friendly advice for administrators: it would be in your best interest to know more about the technology for which you are ultimately responsible. Here are two scenarios that illustrate why administrators ought to pay more attention to the technology under their supervision.

Several years ago, after finishing a long-term commitment to a high-tech school project, I did the gentlemanly thing. First, I labeled every server in the school as server 1, 2, 3, and so on. I placed a sticker on the front of each server stating clearly what it did. I attached another sticker to each server with the server software's serial number clearly printed. (If you don't know the software version number and the serial number, you cannot get support for the software, and you cannot get it upgraded without buying an entirely new license.) Furthermore, I sent a personal letter to the school's administrator explaining how the school network functioned, what each server did, and so on. Inside the main envelope I put a second, sealed envelope with my name signed across the flap. The sealed and signed inner envelope contained the user names and passwords that would give anyone with the knowledge of these items administrative access to every function of every server in the school's system. Naturally, this confidential information had been passed on to the person who inherited my administrative status on these servers. But if anything ever went wrong, I wanted the school administrator to have a fighting chance of regaining access to the critical functions of these servers.

By now you might be asking, "Why not just give this information to the administrator without all the 'cloak and dagger' of sealed and signed envelopes?" The simple answer is that administrators lose credibility with their employees if they have the ability to read employee e-mail and look at their personal files on a server. With the passwords, administrators could be accused of snooping; without the passwords, they cannot. Imagine an administrator saying the following: "If the U.S. Post Office sends you mail, I won't open it, and if the school's server sends you e-mail, I won't open it either. I could if I had the password, but I don't. I am a gentleman/gentlewoman, and I hope others act similarly." If I were an administrator, I would want to be able to make this statement honestly.

So, my second piece of friendly advice for administrators is this: you don't want to know the administrative user names, passwords, and so on for a school's servers, but you do want to know that the information exists, where it is, and how to get at it if you need to.

The second scenario that illustrates why administrators need to pay more attention to technology goes as follows. A few weeks ago I had lunch with a friend who happens to be a school superintendent. At lunch he wanted to know what I thought of iMacs. His district's director of information technology had stated that iMacs were a security risk in the schools because iMacs had modems and so could be used to dial into the schools' administrative systems. I pointed out that a small laptop computer in an attaché case was a more serious risk and that in any case there weren't any dial-in numbers/modems on the administrative server or the administrative network. I then asked why anyone would want to hack into a school's administrative system just to get the daily attendance count for a school. I added that this seemed a lot like locking your dirty socks in a safe because someone might want to steal them. I don't think the quip went over very well.

But then I got serious and reminded the superintendent that his administrative servers were in a 70-year-old firetrap of a building and asked if he had a disaster recovery plan, any redundancy in the administrative network, or any off-site back-up for the servers. At this he turned pale and said he didn't know but didn't think so. Incidentally, schools and universities in many states are required by law to have disaster recovery plans, although accountability for such plans is often lacking.

So my third piece of friendly advice for administrators is this: don't sweat the small stuff, but be able to recover within 24 hours from the catastrophic loss of any telecommunications link, network, server, or other critical component of the university's, district's, or school's technology.

Note that I just mentioned "telecommunications link." As schools and universities become more dependent on their Internet connections to conduct their day-to-day business, they become more dependent on the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) they use and on their connections to them. My own university, for example, is connected to a single ISP by a single fiber optic thread not much larger than a human hair! The ownership of our ISP has changed hands three times in as many years, and the "level of support and response time" continues to decline.

So my fourth piece of friendly advice for administrators is this: back up your connections to the outside world, and don't trust a single connection to a single ISP.

So far, I've been discussing technology and not people. In many ways building redundancy into a system with technology is easier than building redundancy into a system with people. Although I have already admitted my ignorance of administrative matters, it seem to me that most administrators have a single person, assistant, or lead teacher who is in charge of all the technology for the school, district, or university. And, without exception, every school, school district, college, and university that I have worked with on high-tech matters has had a single person (or a very few people) whose loss would adversely affect the operation of the enterprise. In some cases, this key person was in charge of the core switch fabric of the network, the directory server, the telecommunications servers, the administrative server (payroll, etc.), the distance-learning server, or other "mission-critical" functions of the school's technology. What happens if this key person suddenly quits and shortly thereafter something breaks?

So a fifth piece of friendly advice for administrators is: think about every person who is critical to making the technology work, and consider what you would do tomorrow if that person were to quit tonight. Consider requiring all key people to mentor an assistant.

And a sixth piece of friendly advice for administrators follows from the fifth: make all your high-tech people develop a plan for what happens when they leave.

The next item for discussion is perhaps more controversial than the previous ones. I have noticed that administrators tend to think about two kinds of money: theirs and other people's. Typically, administrators try to get someone else to spend money on hardware, software, repairs, and replacements before they agree to spend "their own" money.

On the surface, this seems like a good plan. The result, however, often causes an administrator to reason, "I am going to wait on replacing that computer (or server) and see if the district or university will do it for me." This wait-and-see attitude sometimes lasts for years. If the district or university has loads of money in a giant fund for keeping equipment "current," this plan works. Unfortunately, there's hardly ever enough money in these budgets, and the replacement cycles of such plans are often five years or longer. The problem is exacerbated in high-tech schools that have several hundred computers and half a dozen servers in their inventory. Furthermore, if you factor in other technology such as television monitors, camcorders, phone systems, data projectors, and so on, the problem is greatly compounded.

An unfortunate result of administrative procrastination with regard to replacement is that what money a school does have for equipment is often frittered away on such trivial items as new videotapes, drill-and-practice programs, software upgrades, clip art, and so on, while the hardware just gets older and older.

Suppose that there's $15,000 in a school budget that could be used for hardware upgrades and replacement. This much money will purchase from 10 to 15 new computers. If this money is used every year to upgrade computers, the teachers and administrators at a school will have their computers replaced every three to four years. When an adult's computer is replaced, it can be handed down to students. A refresh cycle like this one gives everyone something to look forward to. It's also easier to replace a few computers every year than to try to install a hundred or more all at once in August.

So I offer my seventh piece of friendly advice for administrators: gradually replace/refresh the technology at your school, and don't procrastinate and hope someone else will do it for you all at once.

Of course, matters such as the "high-stakes" testing movement are putting immense pressure on administrators at every level. It's easy to see why they don't have the time to be concerned with the issues I've discussed here. So it shouldn't be a surprise to learn that the technology in a school is often not used in a focused way. I get into lots of schools. And as I walk the halls and visit the classrooms, I see children doing all kinds of things on classroom computers. My point is that the children are doing so many different things that it is impossible to discern any kind of overall mission or purpose in the way the technology is being used.

Over 50 years ago Ralph Tyler advanced a simple premise: if you are trying to decide how to pick learning activities for children, pick the activities that will help them accomplish the largest number of objectives or practice the largest number of skills. For example, if children do phonics worksheets, they are practicing a single skill. If they write a story, they are practicing many skills. This simple idea has immense ramifications for how technology is used in a school. I wish all schoolpeople had this simple idea indelibly etched on the inside of their foreheads!

Let me contrast my walk down the halls of the schools above with a different walk. On this walk, I find that, in nearly every classroom I visit, the children are writing, communicating, and illustrating. They are using word processors, sending e-mail letters to friends, illustrating their writing, critiquing stories they have read, creating class and club newsletters, and so on. Now this second school clearly has a mission for its technology.

So this brings me to my eighth piece of friendly advice for administrators: develop a mission or focus for your school technology and always keep Tyler's principle in mind. Choose well!

To conclude, administrators set the tone and lead. Thus my final bit of friendly advice is simple: don't delegate the wise use of technology in your school to others.

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Last updated 8 May 2000
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