In “How to Get the Teachers We Want” (features, Summer 2009), Rick Hess urges us to rethink the teacher challenges of the 21st century. He argues convincingly that to ensure that all our schools have sufficient numbers of high-quality teachers to teach all our children well, we need to move away from outdated assumptions about teacher recruitment and the irrational arrangements of teachers’ work.

Taken together and implemented meaningfully, the changes Dr. Hess promotes would constitute radical, almost revolutionary, reform. Oddly, Dr. Hess ends on a moderate note, suggesting that we ought to “recognize that institutions change slowly and celebrate incremental advances” toward a “more flexible, rewarding, and performance-focused profession.”

We respectfully disagree. We believe that a large-scale transformation of schooling in America is just over the horizon and therefore the professional arrangements of the teaching enterprise will have to change sooner rather than later.

American schooling, as we’ve known it for more than a century, has already been disrupted. The Internet and an aggressive network of education entrepreneurs have exploded the monopoly that teachers and textbooks have long held over students’ access to knowledge. It is becoming increasingly clear that to truly educate all children well, instruction must be personalized for every student yet at the same time directed toward common goals.

Dr. Hess notes that to meet these instructional challenges, teachers’ roles must be specialized. We wholeheartedly agree, adding that what we term “unbundled education” requires that schools implement what we’re calling (in “Toward the Structural Transformation of Schools: Innovations in Staffing,” a paper from Learning Point Associates) a “neo-differentiated” staffing model. This model differentiates instructional roles according to staff skill and expertise and puts each student at the center of the organizational chart. It outsources some of the work of teachers to experts in the community in virtual learning spaces.

Structural transformation and differentiated staffing sound intimidating, but the work has already begun. Take a look at New Hampshire’s Extended Learning Opportunities (ELO) initiative or the newly piloted School of One in New York City. These innovations reject schooling’s “industrial rhythms” of the past. The options in 2009 are only as containable as we allow them to be. Now is the time to begin working together toward a system that helps to facilitate success for all learners.

Jane G. Coggshall
Research Associate

Molly Lasagna
Policy Specialist
Learning Point Associates