On Tuesday this week, the New York Times reported the failure to thrive of African-American boys in American public schools. Policy-makers quietly tore their hair out, trying to get to the bottom of this persistent anomaly in academic performance. On Wednesday the Times reported the appointment of Cathleen Black, a white female publishing executive, with no teaching experience, to the position of Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools.

Race and gender should not be primary qualifications in school administrative appointments, but teaching experience ought to be. Choosing an administrator from outside the field of education shows a fundamental distrust and disrespect for the calling of the teacher.  It sends the message, that began with the appointment of Joel Klein to the same position, that school reform is something done to teachers, not of the teachers, by the teachers and for the teachers.

The best school administrators began their careers in classrooms. This is not a matter of paying your dues, but of walking a mile, or a hundred miles, in the shoes of a teacher.  Classroom teachers understand things that the public critics of education often do not get: that students often bring enormous distractions from their family environment to school; that chronic absenteeism affects the whole school environment as much as the absent student; that the quality of writing, speaking, and listening in a class diminishes in proportion to class size; that test performance has very little to do with actual learning.

All of this can be learned from a few days of studying the research or sitting in a focus group of teachers, but the true impact can only be felt by teaching.  Only a teacher knows the full impact of adding three students to a class of 32 or of subtracting one angry student from a class of 35. Only a teacher knows how implementing a unit plan that extends over four weeks can be subverted by 20 per cent of a class that shows up only half of those days.  Only a teacher understands how disruptive test preparation is for a class that has been developing critical habits of mind over the previous ten weeks. You have to feel the difference. You have to see it in the eyes of the students.

Politicians will see this as romanticizing the teaching profession. To them teaching and learning is no more than production and distribution. School mandates and scripted lessons are the inputs, students and their test scores are the products and distribution is reporting the data. You enrich one side of the equation and the other side naturally increases.  I had to smile when I noticed that the Common Core Readiness Standards for writing described the writing process as “production and distribution.” No teacher would have written that as a curriculum goal.

Shelley Harwayne rose to the level of Area Superintendent in New York City without losing her connection to the classroom. Her books about teaching literacy and celebrating student achievement are required reading in teacher preparation classes. No matter how far her work took her from the classroom, she always had the feeling of teaching in her bones. If she had to make tough decisions, teachers could still console themselves she had made them in the context of classroom experience.

The same will not be said about the next Chancellor of the New York Public Schools. Regardless of her skills in negotiation and management, she will not bring the experience of teaching in the classrooms she supervises. She will bring the experience of an elite education and children who attend boarding school. None of this should be held against her, but it diminishes her qualifications to lead a public school system.

It also sends a message to teachers that they will not be heard or trusted for another administration of so-called “school reform.”