I’m a fan of teachers and I approve of the idea that they know far more regarding what their students need to increase learning than all the administrators and School Boards and the people who publish textbooks to make the Texas Board of Education happy. And for once teachers are being given their shot to run a school they way they believe it should be run. For at Brick Avon Academy in Newark, NJ that is dream is about to become a reality.
Shortly after landing at Malcolm X Shabazz High School as a Teach for America recruit, Dominique D. Lee grew disgusted with a system that produced ninth graders who could not name the seven continents or the governor of their state. He started wondering: What if I were in charge?
… Today, Mr. Lee and five other teachers — all veterans of Teach for America, a corps of college graduates who undergo five weeks of training and make a two-year commitment to teaching — are running a public school here with 650 children from kindergarten through eighth grade.
As the doors opened on Thursday at Brick Avon Academy, they welcomed students not as novice teachers following orders from the central office, but as “teacher-leaders.”
“This is a fantasy,” Mr. Lee said. “It’s six passionate people who came together and said, ‘Enough is enough.’ We’re just tired of seeing failure.” […]
At Brick Avon, the principal, Charity Haygood, who calls herself the “principal teacher,” teaches every day, as do the two vice principals; Ms. Haygood started her career in Teach for America and eventually became vice principal for five years at another school.
While they are in charge of disciplining and evaluating staff members, they plan to defer all decisions about curriculum, policies, hiring and the budget to a governance committee made up largely of teachers elected by colleagues.
As the NYT article points out, this is not an isolated situation but a growing phenomenon. Other school districts are doing the same thing. In Los Angeles, 29 schools are turning over the keys to the educational car to the teachers, rather than relying on an outmoded hierarchical structure in which teachers are told what to teach, how to teach and when to teach by administrators who do not teach. Detroit is also experimenting with a school without a Principal in which the teachers will make all the decisions.
Will it be easy for these teacher-leaders to take this step? Probably not. School adminsitrators, entrenched in their positions and their own ideological beliefs about how schools should be run often oppose the idea that teachers should be granted such authority. However, I for one am rooting for the teachers to succeed.
Every class my son and daughter has ever taken in which they truly excelled, and in which they not only learned a subject well but also learned how to learn, was because of an outstanding teacher. A teacher who, more often than not, went beyond the stated curriculum and the standards set by state administrators and local school board members and his or her own principal.
That is, the most successful teachers in my experience have been the ones who bucked the system. Teachers, who because they cared about my children, went above and beyond the call of duty to encourage them, help them and raise the bar for what they thought was capable.
In second grade my daughter was unable to complete her school work in class and had difficulty focusing and concentrating on her lessons. It was her second grade teacher, a young woman who hadn’t yet learned that children who were having trouble in school weren’t worth the trouble who helped fashion a special learning program to help her.
Through her efforts we were able to identify obtain the medical and psychological assistance to identify our daughter as a child with ADHD. More importantly, that young woman instilled in my daughter that she wasn’t stupid, she wasn’t “slow” and that she could learn as well, if not better than her classmates.
Today, my daughter is in the most advanced mathematics class for her grade level, as well as Honors English, Honors Chemistry and AP World History. She learned that her condition, while it can be frustrating at times, is not a reason to limit her expectations and goals for her education. Without her second grade teacher who took the extra time to intervene on her behalf and give a young child who was struggling with her ADHD a chance to succeed, I don;t know if that would have happened.
Of course, along the way, my daughter has come across other committed, dedicated teachers whose love of teaching has inspired her and lit the fires of her own ambitions. She, who once dreamed of being a “pop star” now has her sights set on being a scientist. We consider ourselves blessed to have had teachers who worked with her to help her succeed and thrive, even if that meant going the extra mile, or teaching outside the prescribed box.
But we also know that in far too many schools limit their teachers by wearing down their spirits and insisting ion a rigid, formulaic approach to how kids should be taught, what they should be taught and the order in which subjects should be presented to children. This very rigidity, imposed by people who themselves often have never been teachers, or who have no idea of the difficulties current teachers face, deny our current teachers the opportunity to use their own talents and creativity and ingenuity to make their classrooms a better learning environment for their students.
The best businesses, the ones that have the greatest success are often the ones that are the most flexible and allow their employees to have a say in how their jobs are done. The corporations that are the most hidebound and hierarchical are often the ones that fail to adapt well to a changing business environment.
They see their workers as liabilities, and not as assets. As a result, as we have seen countless times over the last three decades, many of our major corporations that once dominated thioer field have failed to keep pace with the rest of the world. By treating their employees as disposable they have lost sight of what made them successful in the first place.
In my humble opinion, the more control you give any employee over how they go about accomplishing their job, the more you allow them to exercise their creativity and intelligence in executing the tasks given to them, the better off your business will be. The same is true in the field of education. I believe that the more we allow teachers to control their classrooms and how they teach the better learning environments those classrooms will become, and, in the end the better our children — all our children — will learn.
And isn’t that the point? To give every child the best opportunity to learn the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life? I believe letting teachers make the critical decisions on how schools are run is the best way to go about that task. Let’s face it, they can’t do any worse than our current system where teachers are often mere automatons restricted by a curriculum, textbooks and teaching methods not of their choosing. It’s time to give them the reins and the chance to show us all what they can do. My guess is that, like the teachers who helped my daughter, the results will astound us.