Did anyone in the above post or comments say that teachers shouldn’t be accountable? Why would anyone even suggest such a thing, as it is absurd. Few people are more “accountable” than schoolteachers and that’s as it should be.

Sorry, but this post is one big non sequitur. Empowering teachers is not the opposite of holding them accountable. It’s just not.

It’s funny that we say we need to pay teachers more, but increasingly treat them like robots.

The standardization of education is as outdated as mimeograph machines! Yet here we are, forcing standards onto a generation of children who will most certainly live far less standardized lives than previous generations.

The fear that drives this is a “worker shortage”. The fear that these children, mainly poor, minority students, under performing on standardized tests, will let us down in the future as poor employees or worse, unemployable. But if we can get them to test well, then they will be good employable adults. Hogwash! They will not thrive or love learning in classrooms that are boring and scripted. Education is about establishing a relationship with your own learning that will persist beyond your school days.

What needs to happen in US schools is as much about trusting teachers as trusting our children!

I taught in various states from 1964 to 2007. During most of that time I taught very much the way you have described. Like many other American teachers of young children, I was much influenced by teacher educators from the UK (Moira McKenzie), Australia and New Zealand (Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Marie Clay and others). For almost my entire career I was trusted as a trained professional to exercise my best judgment with my students.

During the last decade, privateers have been allowed to take over our public schools as independent but tax supported charters. These people can and do siphon off money from these schools (mostly schools for poor children of color – surprise!) to make a profit. Needless to say, there has been a frenzied effort across the country to realize huge fortunes by dipping into the previously untouched treasure chest of public school money. In order to do this, these privatizers have sought to undermine public education, mainly by painting our teachers as lazy and incompetent. So far they’ve only been successful in very poor areas because many of these parents are desperate for better educational opportunities for their children. For the most part, American children of affluence do fairly well academically and their parents are usually pleased. I have no idea how legislation allowing privatization happened, but I suspect it occurred while citizens were distracted by the recession. I don’t remember voting for this at all.

As I said, there is a huge effort nationally to discredit teachers. This is being done by judging them according to the test scores of the children. So the teachers of the high-scoring rich kids are declared “excellent” while the teachers of the low-scoring low-income children are judged “ineffective.” Again, the purpose is to move these teachers out, so younger, less expensive teachers can be moved in. The whole goal of “reform” in this country is actually an attempt to save money or to make money.

What Kim Farris-Berg is suggesting is that schools be turned over to teachers to run. These teachers, as full professionals, would make most decisions about instruction, curriculum and governance. So far as I know there aren’t too many schools like this in the United States. Are there any in the UK or New Zealand? This is what I mean by the “future.” I believe true reform will come when teachers are in charge of their own schools and are free to be full professionals.

The fact that many “education policy experts” have great difficulty in imagining a world in which teachers have real authority is likely due to the low status teachers have in our country and the fact that the field is dominated by women. And that’s probably the Number One reason why our educational system is not as strong as we would like. This is a cultural problem and it runs deep. The people responsible are not our hard-working teachers, but the citizens who constantly express contempt and disrespect for the men and women who have chosen to serve the children of our country.

Do you sincerely wish to strengthen our educational system for the benefit of children? If so, you can’t go wrong by supporting the teachers we have now, while advocating for a stronger, better prepared, more autonomous and better paid teaching profession. That’s just common sense.