Education Evolving wants to give teachers a larger role in their schools through a model that they call “Teacher Professional Partnerships.”
Consider the following three propositions:
1. If teachers are to be accountable for student learning, teachers should control what matters for student learning. It’s a serious mistake to be trying to push accountability down to the classroom while pulling authority up to the district office, up to the state level and up to the national government.
2. A good many people want to teach but many, once in teaching, don’t want to stay. Turnover is a big problem. If this country is going to improve retention, teaching will have to offer them a really good job and a really good career.
3. The question of ‘teacher quality’ isn’t as simple as conventional ‘reform’ suggests. It’s not a matter just of individual skills and attitudes. ‘Teacher quality’ depends partly on how the school is organized and run.
On July 25, in Washington, Education Evolving put these propositions to about a dozen of the individuals and organizations most closely involved with teachers and teaching, such as the U.S. Department of Education, American Federation of Teachers, National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and National Education Association.
E|E supports the idea that teachers, like white-collar professionals in other fields, might organize partnerships to run a school, a department of a high school, or a learning program district-wide.
Schools organized on this model began appearing in Minnesota’s charter sector about 1993 and have since begun to appear in other states and in the district sector of public education.
The story is told in Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots, by Kim Farris-Berg and Edward Dirkswager, published in 2012.
The partnership idea turns out to link closely with the efforts by a number of these organizations concerned that conventional ‘reform,’ with its scripting of teachers’ work, is driving out some of the best teachers from America’s schools.
Both the major unions, the AFT and the NEA, are interested in building teaching as a profession. Tom Carroll at NCTAF stresses the importance of teacher collaboration to successful school ‘turnarounds’. Richard Ingersoll reported from his research (published in Who Controls Teachers’ Work) that schools work better where teacher roles are larger.
In negotiations currently in Rochester, NY, the union and the new superintendent are currently negotiating a way to build the partnership idea into the new district contract.
This partnership idea, the idea of moving away from the boss/worker model that has been a given in traditional school, is a part of the strategy of innovation being urged by Education Evolving. The thought is not that this is ‘the right way’; it is simply that to succeed with its effort to improve schools and learning, American education policy cannot limit itself to marginal changes in traditional school.
E|E views as worthwhile the goal to increase the autonomy of the school and to enlarge teachers’ role in the school. This might involve organizing the school formally as a partnership or workers’ cooperative, but equally might involve simply a shift in roles within a school organized in the traditional single-leader model.
For more information, please visit the Education Evolving website:
http://www.educationevolving.org/teachers/partnerships
