Tony Pavia Unplugged

Tony Pavia, the popular principal of New Canaan High School, announced that he will retire at the end of the school year. Patch asked Pavia to look back at his years as a principal, and ahead at the future of educating the students of New Canaan.

Patch: What are the the biggest challenges you've encountered in your years as a Principal?

Pavia:  The biggest job is balancing interests. The modern day principalship involves balancing students, teachers, parents, the community, the central office. Everyone has a different viewpoint. 

In the old days, it was simple: an administrator's duties would revolve around discipline. You'd determine what's best for the kid and you made that decision.  It's not quite that simple anymore. The schools moved from a source that was totally authoritarian to one that's more political, where you're working with various groups of people and you have to try to get consensus and you have to get support. 

You have to work very hard to change things and to promote certain policies and to move the school forward.
  

Patch: Are the challenges of a different nature in New Canaan?

 

Pavia: I've worked in city and suburban districts and the challenges are equal in both. Some people look at a city district and say, "Wow, you have all those challenges. What about the kids, what about resources, what about this, what about that?" And then you have a suburban district, and they say, "What about those parents and what about the affluence?"

The truth is there are different challenges with the kids and there are different challenges with the parents in each community, but I don't see any as being greater or less important. The kids are pretty much the same in many ways. They're teenagers and they're at a stage in their lives that's bumpy.

Patch: Before you came to New Canaan, you were principal at Stamford High School. How has the job changed since then?

Pavia: The electronic age has made it much more challenging. Just my demands of correspondence -- I'm always on the verge of panic everyday. I don't get any less mail, I don't get any fewer phone calls, but I have the electronic burden which, frankly, is onerous. It's immediate and it's demanding. 

You tend to get more things than you would normally get because it's simpler, there's no filter anymore.

Years ago, if you were going to write an angry letter, you had to take a piece of paper, you had to write it, fold it and mail it, or you had to pick up the phone and talk to somebody at the other end. E-mail is very easy. I don't think it has elevated dialog between the school and the parent. It has taken away the old fashioned conversation face to face.

It has also presented challenges in terms of behavioral and cultural problems. You have cyber issues that you wouldn't have had 10-20 yrs ago. Bullying has always been there and meanness has always been there, but now it's in a new form. It's more anonymous, it's safer for people to be mean. It wasn't safe when I was a kid, walking up to somebody and calling them a jerk, you had to weigh the importance of calling them a jerk with what the consequence could be. There's something blatantly unfair about the ability to do something anonymously.



Patch: New Canaan is an affluent, protected and less diverse community than many others. How does the school prepare students to go out in the world?

 

Pavia: We have a substantial group of parents who do not want their kids to experience any hardship, whether it's in the form of a grade, a disciplinary consequence, or in the form of disappointment. They're well intentioned, but sometimes, in trying to do all that for their child, they're removing the very things that would be formative experiences, and the very things that would make that child more resilient, tougher and more able to deal with adversity.

I really think we are in danger of heading toward a place where kids have no adversity, and I worry that we've come to a point where we're going be spending more time with parents than with their kids. We now have school districts that send home every quiz, every homework assignment. I don't believe in that.  I've avoided that technology because, in principle, I believe that high school starts to become more about the kid's ability to negotiate this obstacle course called high school.

I know there are a lot of people who disagree with me on that, but when you look at some other generations, the very things that were difficult and unfair and tough and made them sad are the things that made them successful later.

Patch: Has the focus on college changed your job?

Pavia: The old paradigm was that society, parents and the school, in general, stressed an endgame that was about the student being a well-rounded person and citizen of society. Unfortunately, now the paradigm has changed. The endgame is very simply college and, in my opinion, it has created a terrible system which really expects every single kid to be exactly the same, to learn the same way, and to be at the identical developmental stage as everyone else.

There are countless stories of successful people -- CEOs, presidents of the United States, world leaders -- who were not successful teenagers. It's getting to point now that if you're an unsuccessful teenager it's unacceptable, and that's not based in any history, science, or anything else. Teenage years are, by nature, a time to make mistakes and not be perfect.

The pressure for kids to be perfect because the endgame is college is stifling. 

We want every kid to be doing nine clubs, eight sports, fourteen community service activities and getting A's.   I don't know of any other institution that expects everybody to be exactly the same.

Patch: What can parents do about this problem?

Pavia: I think parents can revolt and make the point with their children that the endgame is life, not getting into college. One is a short term endgame the other is long term, and I think the short term is getting in the way of the long term.

Patch: What can the schools do about this?  

Pavia: The schools have to constantly monitor this and articulate it. We're educators first and foremost. We can't be saying, "Do your homework because you're not going to get into a good college." We can't buy into that. We have to have conversations about why learning is important and that sometimes your grade isn't exactly the same as learning.

The politics of education makes that difficult now because it's reduced the conversation to standardized test scores. We've reduced the entire educational formula to standardized test scores, and the best educators I know, the finest teachers I know, don't buy that. But it's a political reality we live with.

In New Canaan,we are training future leaders. Their leadership is not going to depend solely on standardized measures. It's a huge challenge and a frustrating one.

Patch: What advice do you have for your successor?

Pavia: When you're a principal, it's not unlike being an elected official -- everybody's trying to tug you in a different direction.

I would advise that principal to have a core set of beliefs and to articulate that set of beliefs everyday, everywhere they go, so that when they make a decision or when they have a controversial issue, they can fall back on these core beliefs.

I think if you talk to any parent, whether they agree with me or not, they know I've had a consistent voice about human development every year I've been here. I've never changed that.

Patch: What are some of the accomplishments you are most proud of?

 

Pavia: I'm proud that we were able to take a school that grew rapidly and still maintain a small school environment, and I'm proud that we were able to try to provide opportunities for every type of kid, not just athletes, not just scholars, not just musicians, actors and actresses, but opportunities for everybody.

I'm also proud that I was Principal during a time of really big changes -- an enormous construction project. That was a lifetime in and of itself for me. Throughout that we were able to maintain a stable course. 

There were years of transition in faculty -- huge faculty  retirement and  turnover, a new generation of teachers coming in -- a huge construction project , and the enrollment going up. My goal in that wasn't too exciting: it was to make sure we held our own and improved while all this was going on.

Patch: What gives you some of the most pleasure?

Pavia: A smiling kid. It's a thrill working with teenagers. They are so funny, just the most fun.

My model has always been someone who's a little more eccentric, but who really treated the kids like his own kids. 

I suspended my son when I was principal at Stamford High and he still loves me.

I tell kids, "Look, I would do this if you were my own kid." I don't want them to think that I hate them and that I think they're bad, but I want them to take their punishment. I want them to take it on the chin the same way that if I make a mistake I take it on the chin. They're my kids.