Are the four million women and men in the K–12 classrooms of the United States professional educators or working teachers?
That question hovered over conversations at the provocative education summit held last week at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Its task force, the Education Futures Council, has just released a report calling for a restructuring of the educational system that places schools, not districts, states or the federal government, at its apex. “[O]nly teachers and principals have . . . the local knowledge of their students . . . and the ability to shape the classroom experience to create learning. . . . Most teachers and principals today are highly committed to their roles.” If they are given the necessary resources and recognition, it will enhance “the occupations’ professional status” and produce “outcomes our students and our nation desire.”
The report resembles the original proposal to create charter schools issued in 1988 by little-known education professor Roy Budde. Districts should “grant charters to teachers at individual schools” who “have the autonomy to manage their affairs,” if they live up to commitments. Budde’s suggestion won the blessing of legendary union leader, Al Shanker, on the grounds that it gave schools autonomy from mindless bureaucrats: “One of the things that discourages people from bringing about change in schools is the experience of having that effort stopped for no good reason.”
In the Hoover conference’s opening session, scholar Eric Hanushek highlighted the teacher as the school’s single most important resource. Variation in teacher quality, more than any other school factor, affects what happens to a young person’s future in the job market and their social life. Patrick Kelly, a teacher from South Carolina, gave life to these numbers by sharing ideas previously expressed in the South Carolina Daily Gazette. There he recalls two of his high school teachers who “were artists, not robots. And their ability to exercise their artistic license in their classrooms created rich, engaging, and transformative learning experiences.” Kelly objects to the claim that “all schools can achieve outstanding results if educators simply follow, with fidelity, the precise steps necessary to implement the latest . . . ‘research-based’ curriculum” and notes, “The only thing my best teachers followed with ‘fidelity’ was their commitment to meeting their student where they were to help them get to where they wanted to go.” Judging from his convincing presence on the stage, it’s likely Kelly himself is a stimulating professional in the classroom.
But the conversation turned testy when Houston’s superintendent, Mike Miles, lifted his eyebrows. The Texas Department of Education declared Houston a failed school system and replaced the district’s elected school board with a state-appointed board of managers, who appointed Miles, known for his successes in nearby Dallas. Texas plans to retain control until every Houston school reaches state expectations in math and reading.
At the conference, and in my post-conference podcast with the superintendent, Miles expressed doubt about handing control over to teachers and principals. That had been the previous practice in Houston, where each school was operating more or less on its own. Some schools succeeded, but the majority were failing to meet state standards.
As a remedy, Miles instituted the “New Education System (NES)” for failing schools. The central office tells teachers and principals at each grade level what is to be taught in reading and math and what pedagogical techniques are to be faithfully followed. After visiting Houston schools, Robert Pondiscio wrote in Education Next (see “The Last Hurrah,” features, Fall 2024) that “the pace of instruction is tightly managed. The first 45 minutes of an NES lesson is teacher-led direct instruction, followed by a 10-minute mini-assessment, or ‘demonstration of learning’.” A number of teachers complained they are being asked to stop instruction every four minutes for discussions of the material among small groups of students. Miles does not deny the practice, but he says this is just one of multiple approaches designed to stir student engagement.
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Most teachers endorse NES, Miles tells me, and the practice is spreading to classrooms not under NES prescriptions. Working teachers like to know what is expected of them each morning when they pick up the day’s lesson plan; they appreciate knowing their work is done when they head home to shop for groceries, feed the children, and settle in for an evening with friends and family. In Houston, teachers are treated as competent, but not particularly outstanding, workers who need to be given clear direction, not overwhelmed with the responsibility of figuring things out on their own. The number of Houston schools not meeting state standards has already declined substantially, and Miles is hopeful the number will reach zero within another year.
Houston is not the only big-city school district turning toward scripted instruction. In New York City, the chancellor is asking teachers and principals to provide instruction according to the “science of reading,” an updated variation of the traditional phonics approach. The new policy has suddenly become a popular alternative to the “balanced literacy” method formerly promoted by Lucy Calkins at Columbia Teachers College, which encourages students to guess the meaning of words from context and adjacent pictures (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features, Summer 2007). Teachers are given some latitude in the way they present the new curriculum, but they are expected to undertake the demanding task of drilling students in the pronunciation of letters, syllables, and words in much the same way my dedicated first-grade teacher, Miss Hanson, taught me. In a system heavily shaped by the philosophical approach promoted at nearby Columbia Teachers College, it takes a good deal of centralized direction to shift teachers to a more arduous classroom strategy. Yet, after some negotiation, the approach has won local union endorsement.
It is Miles, not the authors of the Hoover report, who expresses concern about union power. In Houston, teachers are rewarded with higher salaries if they teach critical subjects such as math and reading, if they work in more challenging settings (NES schools), and if they follow with fidelity the central-office guidelines. To pay for the salary upgrades, Houston has eliminated the 15 percent increment for those who earn a master’s degree. None of that would have been possible had Texas a duty-to-bargain law.
Just how long Miles will survive as Houston’s superintendent remains to be seen. The working teacher model is not an easy political sell, especially when a system has been taken over by the state. Locally elected school board members find fault with innovations after they have been stripped of their authority. Local media sympathize with those who have lost power. Outsider superintendents are not given second chances.
The worker vs. professional question is as critical for reformers as “to be or not to be?” was for Hamlet. Should schools raise the performance of working teachers by giving them clear guidelines? Or should they give teachers autonomy and rewards that will attract a large cadre of great teachers to the profession? I would like to think we could design the nation’s schools in ways that could attract four million Patrick Kellys to the profession. I certainly had such an educator when I took two years of Latin from Mrs. Brown, but then there was my not-so-hard-working history teacher (cum basketball coach) who left the room at the beginning of the period to smoke in the basement with the janitors.
The conference left me with much to ponder.
Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He welcomes your reactions to this post by email at paul.peterson@educationnext.org; responses will be curated and shared periodically. His Education Exchange podcast is available with a new episode each Monday.