Philips, Purdue; Joe Diffie
Ken’s World
It was the end of the day. The end of an era. Mike said goodbye to a couple old friends, turned, and walked away.
Then, almost 2 full years after Mike had left the office that day, Mike got a call. He picked up the phone in his classroom. It was Cece – from his old office.
First, let’s be clear. ‘Left’ may not be the right word. Mike had been ousted. Booted. Given the heave-ho. He had had his run. It had been his turn to be the goat, #1 on Ken’s shit list. Mike had known his time was up. It was an annual thing in their office. Every year, someone was Ken’s darling; someone else was his goat. Mike had been that year’s goat. Everyone else on the team knew, too. They had all seen it coming. They had all experienced it to one extent or another, from one side or the other. The rest of the team had been supportive of Mike, and he of them. Well before his last day came, he had picked up his office space, organized his years of work product, and packed. When that last day arrived, Mike had said good-bye to his friends, given Cece a hug, picked up a couple boxes, and left.
Ken had not been there.
The team people who worked so closely together made up one department of a large, diverse school district. Together, they were strong, solid, and smart. Within the district, their department oversaw programs which provided a wide range of specialized student services both inside and outside of the classroom. They dealt with a lot of sensitive issues, sensitive student needs. They were a world within the larger school-district world of K-12 education.
Some of the programs they oversaw were fairly large; others were small. Some were well funded; other much less so. The team was excellent, all solidly versed in their areas, fields, and duties. They worked together, shared resources, and made things happen. They were well supported by a great administrative staff headed by Cece. All worked under the direction of the man widely known as simply Ken. Over time, they had developed coping mechanisms, individually and collectively, for working with their boss. And boy, was he a piece of work!
Ken had been born and raised in the area, Japanese American by ancestry. He was tough, middle-aged, and not very tall. Maybe it was ancestry, his size, or maybe his family experience with the Japanese Internment during WW II, but for whatever reason, he thought he had to be tough, thought he had to compensate. He seemed to have been born with a chip on his shoulder. He also fancied himself a mover and shaker, a game-player, an empire builder. Lucrative is not a word most people think of as applying to education. Most, but not all. All the more reason for Ken to take advantage of situation. Education could be quite lucrative.
Ken knew people, and they knew him. He also had something on just about everyone. He used the dirt to his advantage. He required loyalty. He required respect. He needed admiration. And as an empire builder, he was always looking for new programs to pick up, staff to take on, funding to acquire. And for a long time, he found and got them. Much of this came through calling in some favors, dolling out others. You scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours. This was his world, and for Ken, this was all very profitable, as well.
Ken loved to talk. That was one of the central features of collective team life. Those in the department who had experienced his love of talking knew what it meant. They had all gotten called into meetings only to discover that the meetings were not what they thought they would be. Ostensibly, the meetings were about programs, issues, topics which that team member was involved in. However, it didn’t take long before the conversation turned to people around their district or across the city. Often, it turned on the people Ken had been out with the previous night.
Night is the operative word. Ken spent most evenings at his favorite bar. Ken stopped by nightly in Chinatown and meet up with his cronies. That was where he cultivated his power base. His group would drink, swap gossip, negotiate deals, and pick up whatever dirt they needed on enemies and friends, alike. Nightly, Ken moved in a smokey, back-stabbing world, and he carried that world into the office in the morning. A cup of coffee or two into a meeting, and colleagues would hear about who was sleeping with whom, who had the goods on whom, who could currently be trusted – and who could not. Many of those people Ken discussed sat in offices down the hall, around the corner, or in schools across town. Ken’s information was meant to be used and useful as the group was trying to do the best for the youth of the city.
Ken had nicknames for just about everyone. Sometimes funny, they were most often mean, biting epithets built on a person’s worst physical features, sexual predilections, personal secrets. For his team, they were uncomfortable. At times, it was hard for members of the team to walk through the halls of their office building, to see the people they had just heard about, and to neither blush nor turn away. They were people the team had to work with daily.
Some days, to escape from the office, Ken would invite someone from the team to go to lunch. Usually, it was his current favorite, that year’s darling. Ken and his lunch companion would head out for noodles, pho’. When the soup arrived, Ken would throw in as much hot sauce as possible before he started eating. He would eat and sweat bullets. That was visible proof of his machismo. Then, he talked.
Mike had worked in the district for many years by the time his time with the team was up. He had started on a cold, snowy day in January many year before – on the first day of school after Winter Break. He had taught in a high school and in a middle school for several years. Over time, he had had some very different experiences and picked up useful skill sets. He had applied and become the “Head Teacher”, a quasi-administrative position, at one of the city’s alternative schools. The position in the school fell within Ken’s broad range of programs. It was not too long before Ken recognized Mike’s abilities and moved him “downtown” as a teacher on special assignment in the district’s administrative headquarters. Mike was that year’s darling. He was taken under Ken’s wing, promoted to an administration position, and became an integral part of his world. At first, it was heady.
To his credit, Ken really had picked up some amazing talent for an imposing team. One of the most outstanding members was a woman named Ann. Ann was brilliant. She knew things. She knew just about everything anyone needed to know about federal and state education laws; she knew how to make the school district run and run efficiently. Once at an important planning meeting, Ann was taking down notes for future review. Watching her, Mike was completely, totally amazed. Ann had two pads of paper, one at her left hand and the other at her right. She was taking notes on both pads, simultaneously. She was writing a different set of notes on each pad with a different hand – one left and one right. When the meeting was over, she had two sets of notes to work from, one focused on one set of issues, the other on another set of issues. Ann was brilliant. She was one of the few people in the world Ken listened to. He knew she was right. Period.
A completely different member of the group was a young man named Raymond. Raymond had a position parallel to Mike’s. He, too, started as a teacher on special assignment. Raymond was also married to a Japanese woman. Unlike Ken, who was Japanese by ancestry but had been born and raised in the US, Raymond’s wife was native Japanese from Japan; she still had family in Japan. Raymond even spoke some Japanese. As a result, he was a Ken favorite for that reason. On the other hand, in Raymond’s eyes, Ken was a sort of sensei, maybe a samurai, who knew. Ken was the boss; Raymond always used the honorific ‘-san’ when he addressed Ken. Raymond was an obsequious servant. Ken used that to his benefit.
As Ken wheeled and dealed, picked up programs and adopted initiatives, there were often new staff members joining the team. This happened at least once every year. Both professional staff and support staff. As a program was added, as work had to be redistributed, and others left, the change frequently required new people. A new person on staff meant Ken’s empire had grown; it looked bigger. His power and influence had grown. Once the team had gotten to know the new hire, and as Ken’s old patterns started to play out, the team would warn the new person to be careful of the meetings and the lunches. They would let their new colleague know that he or she would spend hours listening to gossip, drinking coffee, and eating noodles, but they would still be expected to get the work done. Reactions were different with different personalities. One popular new program specialist picked up on the dynamics quickly and moved on before he was dropped. Another young lady, though, already thinking that she was God’s gift to the world, loved the attention she was getting from her powerful boss. She met, drank, and ate, but she didn’t last long. She never got any of her own work done, and before too long, she was let go. Much as she’d been warned, she never saw it coming.
As for departmental meetings, one-on-ones, and lunches, the team had a survival plan of its own. Ken considered himself a master at divvying up work. There were those tasks which were known parts of each of person’s job functions; there were also all those “other duties as assigned”. And, of course, there were assignments which fell into both buckets. Ken doled any or all of these out to almost anyone. Shuffling tasks and duties also helped to keep the team just a little off balance. It was another way for Ken to maintain control.
The team had developed its own coping mechanism. After one-on-ones and staff meetings, the group usually followed up with meetings on their own – outside the office. They would leave, one by one, and go to a near-by Starbucks or favorite bakery and debrief among themselves. The top item on their meeting agenda was determining who-had-been-given-what to do. They sorted through their collective tasks and discussed the status of each. They clarified what each was working on, who had been given someone else’s assignment, and what there was left, unassigned, to do. It wasn’t easy, but the team got it done. And, truth be told, Ken never picked up on it, and often forgot what he had newly assigned to whom.
As noted, Ken had something on just about everyone, and he loved to talk. He was a power broker and wheeler-dealer in an industry which is rarely a for-profit business. For Ken, though, that is what it was for himself or for his comrades. Lucrative. Scratch my back; grease my palms. One of Ken’s best bar buddies was very involved in Ken’s world of program expansion. His name was Joe, and he was the principal of large high school across town from the district headquarters. Joe was also completing work on his PhD.
Ken-san had assigned some work to Raymond, his teacher-servant. A lot of the work within the department was federally funded, grant-based work, requiring a lot of monitoring, data gathering and reporting. There was always a lot of research and writing to do. Raymond was assigned his share – and at times, more. As it turned out, most of Raymond’s grant funded, required research reporting was being handed over to Joe to fulfill his degree research requirements. Unbeknownst to Raymond, Ken was turning over Raymond’s research documents to Joe. Joe was adapting them, self-crediting the work, and submitting them. Bottom line, Raymond was writing Joe’s papers.
Somehow, Ann accidently discovered this secret. Whistleblowing was out of the question. There was no one to tell. Also, there was no way to prove what was happening. It would have all but killed Raymond, and potentially destroyed several reputations. It was very uncomfortable, but there was nothing any of the team could do. Joe got his PhD, Raymond never discovered the secret, and Ken’s world now had an even stronger ally in the new doctor.
Over several years, Mike had pretty much managed to stay in Ken’s good graces. He worked hard, produced, and had a good reputation in the office and in the field. Like his colleagues, he had seen people rise and fall in the Ken world. As it so happened, though, Ken had incorrectly come to the conclusion that Mike had somehow discovered his covert involvement with Joe’s PhD. Although Mike did not know it at the time, his turn was coming up.
It all came in a year of changes and involved one highly specialized program. The program had only recently come into Ken’s world. He had wanted it, but it had been fully entrenched in another department for years. After some closed-door machinations, the old program manager had been removed, and the program was shifted to Ken’s department. Ken assigned the new body of work to Mike. There was the overarching order to ‘clean the program up’, with an emphasis on responding to some new state and federally mandated requirements. It was a steep learning curve, but Mike figured it out. He worked with old state program people, had conversations, and received guidance from the feds. He consulted with program people staff in other districts around the state. Mike had things pretty much in order to proceed for the coming year. The problem, though, was that what the feds and the state now required, what local district staff wanted, what was considered best practice, and what he drafted as the new district implementation plan was not what Ken wanted. Even as Mike explained the changes in the law, steps he had taken to meet all the requirements and best practice, Ken was not happy.
The handwriting was on the wall. In Ken’s world, Mike knew secrets. He had not followed orders. He was becoming a threat. Mike’s time was winding down. Mike was rapidly becoming the goat.
What happened next was classic Ken. At one of the team’s meetings, Ken let everyone know that Mike’s work was unacceptable, sub-standard. Ken was making a change and re-assigning the job of managing the particular program. He was taking it out of Mike’s incapable hands and giving it to another team member, Vern. It was obvious that everyone was upset, but again, there was almost nothing anyone could do.
So the team had a meeting at Starbucks.
Vern was perhaps the most upset by the turn of events. He felt bad for his friend, Mike, but he also acknowledged that he, himself, knew nothing about this new assignment. Nor did anyone else, as the requirements and implementation process were also all new. Mike had a plan, though.
Vern and Mike met privately. Mike gave Vern a program overview, the highlights of new requirements, and a copy of the plan he had put together. They talked through the newly revised implementation plan. Mike shared contacts around the program, the state and the country. Finally, Mike gave Vern an old floppy disc containing everything he had. He told Vern, “Take this. It has what I drafted. It’s good, it’s complete, it meets all the new requirements. Everyone else likes it. And – it’s done. No need to diddle with it. Just maybe do a little format changing, change the date, put your name on it. Then give it to Ken.” Relieved, Vern did just what Mike had suggested.
At the next team meeting, Ken was happy. He all but waved the document Vern had given him in the air. “There,” he said. “This is finally what I wanted. Nice work, Vern!”
Mike had little work assigned to him from then on. He used his office time to clean up and clean out files, drawers, and stuff. He boxed up the good, final copies of reports, grant documents, and other materials he had worked on over the years. He arranged it all in several banker boxes, which he then labeled. Program. Year. Status. Old stuff. Junk. Good stuff. Keep. Toss. It was all there for the next person to research and use.
The end of the contract year rapidly approached. Ken had given Mike his official notice of the non-renewal of his current position. Well before his last day in the office, Mike made sure that Cece and others on the team knew where he had left things. On his last day, Mike said good-bye.
His new assignment was teaching at a middle school in the far north end of the district. It was actually a really good assignment. The campus was in a beautiful setting, many of his fellow teachers were old friends, and the principal, another friend, had a reputation as one of the best administrators anyone had ever worked under.
Time passed. Then one day almost 2 full years after Mike had left the office, Cece called. She was still a good friend.
“Mike, do you have a copy of those reports you did for our federal grants? Ken needs them for something he’s working on.”
Mike had to chuckle to himself a bit. Then he told her, “Everything is in those boxes that I left in the office before I left. Hard copies – and soft copies. He should be able to find whatever he needs there.”
“Oh,” she replied. She paused. “He threw all your stuff out the day after you left. He was hoping….”
At that, Mike laughed out loud. So did Cece, as he remembered. They chatted, then said good-bye one more time.
That sounds like a good comeuppance ending to a crazy story, but there is more.
Mike had been teaching at the north end middle school for about three years when he got another call from a good friend and colleague, Danielle. Danielle had also had her time with Ken. She’d been able to secure a different leadership position before things became too unbearable for her. She had a proposition.
In her current position, Danielle reported to John, yet another veteran of time with Ken. There had been, in fact, a point where Ken had connived to get rid of John. Unbeknownst to John, Mike had helped thwart Ken’s plan. Now, under Danielle’s lead and John direction, the district had written, applied for and received a very substantial federal educational grant. Funding was for 5 years, at several million dollars per year. Danielle proposed that they hire Mike to lead the project. Job security. Higher salary. Good friends to work with. Mike said he would say yes, in a heartbeat, but added that he needed to talk with his principal. When he did so, even knowing that it would mean that he had have to leave his classroom and her school, she encouraged him to take the position.
The new program was challenging. It was all new, not just to Mike, but to education, in general. It was complex, exciting, and Mike loved it!
About a year into the new project, Mike ran into Ken at district headquarters. Both Ken and Joe had fallen on rough times. Some of those infamous nicknames and a few of their schemes had come around to bite them both. Ken had been ‘reduced’ to teaching at a different middle school in the city; Joe was just gone. Ken saw Mike first and reached out to shake his hand. Mike picked up on Ken’s old, familiar vibes. Ken said that he had heard about the exciting grant project. He said that he was proud of Mike, and, oh, by the way, he, himself, was looking for a job. With a combination of bravado and embarrassment, he added, “Mike, you know me. You know what I can do. I can help you.”
“Love it,” replied Mike. “Thanks, Ken. I’ll call when there’s a place for someone like you.”
Then, as before, five years after he left Ken’s world, Mike said good-bye. He then turned and walked away. Again.