Does Ms. Kleinhopper Really Run the School?

By Stephen G. Barone

April 27 is national Secretaries' Day, so I know it's boorish of me to sound a discordant note when everyone else will be sending floral tributes to the clerical staff or buying them lunches at tony restaurants. But I'm sick of all the phony self-deprecation about how none of us could ever be such a successful principal, director, or superintendent if not for some secretary's legendary typing ability, telephone skills, and flair for collating.

I've been guilty of this, some years even writing cutesy newspaper articles about how secretaries really run the world while we inept bosses mostly bide our time composing obtuse memorandums, unjamming mechanical staplers, and blinking with awed stupidity at our facsimile machines; all of us benignly awaiting the day that we might draw our annuities and retire to our decrepitudes somewhere in Florida.

Such hyperbole seemed funny and harmless to me, until I began to notice that many of the clerical personnel who circumscribe my professional life are beginning to actually believe their own press, resplendent in the attitude that what they do--and by what means and schedule they might accomplish it--is best determined by them without any nettlesome interference from us whose needs they're...