A phrase that gets bandied around quite a bit is “leadership positions.” In general, Parker’s various orientations and communications encourage most students to seek these leadership positions across the school. However, the roles and activities that get lumped into this category are far too broad and varied to be fairly categorized by this. Parker leans on this idea far too hard and in the process dilutes the word to meaninglessness. In general, the “leadership positions” that do exist are just project managers, and Parker does not actually do enough to teach, at least a subset of, its students how to lead.
It is easy to get bogged down in semantics. What does “leadership” even mean? So, in order to get into the substance, let us land on a working definition of leadership. At Parker, when we talk about the need for leadership positions, we generally do it because of the emphasis on leadership in the college process. Though I don’t claim to have an insight into how college admission works, my assumption is that what colleges look for in a “leader” is someone who uplifts and teaches their peers in an organization to ensure the goals of the group they lead are met. Though this is not a perfect framework, it will serve as the basis when outlining the flawed leadership infrastructure at Parker.
Leadership structures at Parker generally work one of two ways –– One is a single leadership body, where, generally, one to five people are the only named leaders in the organization. This is typical of committees, affinity groups, meetups, and some clubs. The other is a tiered structure, usually with some kind of named head (captain, CEO, editor-in-chief) who oversees the whole group and a group of team leaders responsible for a subsection of the work. This is most often seen in groups with deliverables, like “The Weekly,” FTC, ROV, “SCOUT,” and others. For the sake of brevity let us call this former structure as “central leadership” and the latter as “tiered leadership.”
Both of these structures have their strengths and weaknesses but share core tenants. Usually, the chief officer is elected, either internally or externally, at the end of the prior year and serves until the end of the next and there is often little recourse to recall said leaders. The other tenant they generally share is that if your position has a name, it is a leadership position. There are some obvious exceptions. Copy editors or staff writers of “the Weekly” are not ‘student leaders,’ but it serves as a reasonable rule of thumb.
In a September 26 email from Dean of Students Joe Bruno, the school officially recognized 75 student organizations (Committees, meetups, clubs, and Affinity Groups). The Parker Upper School consists of 336 students. The most conservative estimate (one I will demonstrate in a moment is a vast undercounting) says that each organization has, on average, one student leader. That figure tells us 22.3% of the student body are student leaders in some capacity. However, committees have four leaders in general and, by anecdotal evidence, most clubs without deliverables have about three heads. If we are slightly more liberal with our estimate we can assume there are 225 student leaders. That accounts for 67% of the student body. This figure does not even include the vast number of underlying leaders like Opinions Editors, Media Managers, and more who are still recognized as ‘student leaders’.
Who, then, is being led? There are two “student leaders” for every student non-leader. I highly doubt these non-leading students are getting hands-on mentorship from two other students, so what is the actual work of leadership? Clearly, it’s just not all of these people who are actually leading. Instead, based on my own experience, most of these leaders are instead project managers. As a ‘student leader,’ I have most often been asked to maintain some set of responsibilities and then, as a secondary consideration, pass that information on to others. That is not leadership, it is simply taking a position of responsibility. The bloated amount of student leaders and positions is ultimately a result of the emphasis on title over process in the college application process, a process which motivates many of Parker’s students.
Regardless of whether or not these “leadership positions” are occupied by leaders, Parker makes no effort to teach its students how to lead. The most glaring example of this is Student Government Election. Though my thoughts about Student Government have been… well, enumerated, this warrants reexamination. In theory, one could run to be a head of any Committee without having ever spoken to, engaged with, or even read about the existing Committee organization. One can, in the span of a month, go from knowing nothing to being in charge of its operation. Though this is technically an accurate facsimile of our real election system, one might think an educational institution would emphasise learning how to lead before doing it.
Even after being elected there are no systems in place to ensure that, once elected, these lessons are imparted. Broadening this a bit, in general ‘student leaders’ are expected to learn through observation from previous years as well as being dropped into the actual work. Many student leaders have to spend a lot of time rebuilding old systems and lose the time to innovate.
I am, technically, leaving something out. Junior Lifeit technically includes a ‘Leadership Development’ curriculum. However, this curriculum is, to be direct, utterly useless. My time in this curriculum consisted of two things. First, making a list of what we, as a class, believed were the qualities a leader should have, an activity which is not teaching anything but instead complaining about a list of our existing false notions of leadership. The second lesson consisted of watching and reflecting on a Brene Brown video with a woman who has been repeatedly called out for using rhetoric that ignores the lived experience of marginalized people. Neither of these activities actually taught how to lead, but just how to overly intellectualize about leadership.
Both Brene Brown’s and Parker’s education around leadership emphasize “being your authentic self,” however Parker hasn’t done the proper work to allow everyone to be their authentic self safely. The advice, then, ultimately only lands for a subset of students and excludes others who don’t feel safe or ready to be their authentic selves at Parker. At a mostly white and cis institution like Parker, the students who have the opportunity to be their “authentic selves” are mostly often white students which is reflected in the big ticket leadership positions like SG president. Anecdotally, I know plenty of Parker students who feel they can’t be their authentic selves in daily school life and by extension can’t be authentic as leaders
So what? Parker says things it doesn’t mean all the time. In fact most of the things it says it doesn’t mean. Why does this specific lie warrant an article? I think our approach to leadership makes Parker students complacent, lowers work ethic, and fails to hold anyone accountable. The complacency issue comes as a consequence of the fact that most leaders’ goals are to simply keep their head above water. Because student “leaders” dedicate their time to meeting their basic goals, they neither have time to teach non-leaders nor innovate in any way. Meanwhile, non-leaders are not being taught the basic skills that they need, and so, more often than not, also can’t offer innovative ideas or insights. This is why so many student organizations either die out from lack of innovation and interest or become completely stagnant.
In many student organizations one prevailing attitude appears almost every year: “Without [insert seniors here] we are cooked.” This is another symptom of the lack of real leadership. Because the students who are put in positions typically assume all the responsibilities, they do not have time to dedicate to ‘non-leaders.’ When people do find the time to try to impart their knowledge, they often fail because of the failure to teach leadership as a skill. The time is most often wasted because neither part of the relationship has the skills necessary to make it worthwhile nor the time to dedicate to bridging that gap.
In a strange way, this truly does turn out to be a semantics issue. I think one of the solutions to this is simply to redefine what is actually leadership. Being the head organizer of whatever club is not leadership, nor is doing all the work for your club a deliverable. The incentive structure both internally within Parker and externally through the college application system is that you are rewarded for being in the position, not performing well in it. As an organization, as I think this requires more than just mindset change, we need to stop calling and treating everyone in a position of responsibility as a leader.
The other portion is that Parker needs to radically change its “leadership curriculum.” It needs to be taught more like a hard skill – how do you ensure deadlines are met? How do you enforce rules? How do you encourage participation? How do you delegate work? How do you balance being an authority and a friend/peer? These questions are not answered at all by Parker’s current system. This training should also be mandatory for anyone who wants to call themselves a student leader. Something as simple as a mandatory training for committee heads could at least excite some change.
Ultimately, Parker’s leadership structure is so fundamentally tied to its function as a signifier of involvement and position it fails as a way to lead students. If Parker wants to continue to sell itself as training leaders, we ought to actually teach the people to lead and not simply to do the work and posture about it.
