E-Mail: Boon or Bane for School Leaders?

Abstract

FIRST, some numbers: 12,500 and 17,500. These figures represent the quantities of e-mails I sent and received in 2004-05, my first year as a high school principal. Assuming it takes a minute to read or write a typical message, I spent some 500 hours of the school year--about 2 1/2 hours per day--sitting at my computer doing e-mail. Is this normal? Is this what school administration is all about? Is this what we want it to be about? Just to be clear: I'm an average consumer of technology, neither a zealot nor a Luddite when it comes to computers. Having used e-mail for more than a decade, I understand and embrace the fact that digital communication is integral to the functioning of most workplaces in the industrialized world. Nevertheless, I was utterly unprepared for the volume of e-mail flowing through my school, and I remain surprised by the degree to which school leadership revolves around the computer. Am I just being naive? I don't think so. While e-mail certainly played an important role in my former work as a teacher, department head, and summer school director, the volume of it was always manageable. My training in education and nonprofit management focused, as one might expect, on such topics as faculty evaluation, strategic planning, and school law. What I've missed, I see now, is exposure to some of the practical realities of managing a high school, and one of those realities is e-mail. If my case is at all typical--and I suspect it is--it may be time to take stock of the role that e-mail is playing within school communities. Should administrators be spending hours each day at the computer? Are there hidden costs that come with the efficiency of e-mail communication? What is the effect of increasingly digital communication on personnel or on the ethos of a school? And what protocols or best practices should we adopt to address these concerns? Probably everyone would agree that e-mail makes running an organization, including a school, easier. E-mail is a great tool for expediting the many operations and decisions that take place behind the scenes in any educational setting. The major advantages of e-mail seem to be: swift and efficient communication, better-informed decision making through improved consultation with stakeholders, and automatic archiving of correspondence. Unquestionably, e-mail helps me stay organized by functioning as a dynamic to-do list. In keeping me abreast of a wide range of issues, e-mail allows me to swiftly sort questions (yes, no, or let's discuss it) and track issues that require further thought. The Mark as Unread command in Microsoft Office is a godsend, reminding me that I need to follow through on a specific message by highlighting it in boldface, as if I had never read it. The Reply with Quote setting saves time and energy by appending the entirety of an e-mail thread to every new message. It's hard to imagine coordinating the many trips, special events, schedule changes, and meetings in a school without the benefit of digital communication. As I said above, I'm no Luddite, so whenever I'm tempted to complain about the amount of e-mail I get, I think about the even greater number of meetings that would be required to accomplish the same tasks. Indeed, one ethnographic study, carried out before the advent of e-mail, found high school principals slogging through several hundred interactions in a typical day, two-thirds of which involved face-to-face conversations averaging only 2 1/2 minutes each. (1) E-mail helps to impose a sense of order on this massive web of communication, and it has the added advantage of creating a digital record. But I'm probably preaching to the choir here. These advantages will be obvious to schoolpeople. What I'm concerned about are the unexpected consequences of our dependence on e-mail. Like many technologies, e-mail offers both advantages and disadvantages. While the former arguably outweigh the latter, administrators would do well to keep an eye on the unintended drawbacks of doing business through e-mail. …

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