Study Concludes Many Teachers Would Improve With Less Control Of Content
As sweeping reforms dramatically change what it means to be an American teacher, a steady stream of headlines, studies and op-eds assert that teachers are more dissatisfied than ever, that they are seeking to leave the profession, and feel theirhands are tied by bureaucracy and policies that stress standardized testing above all.
But a new set of two pieces by the Center for American Progress, a Democratic Washington, D.C.-based think tank often aligned with the Obama administration, argues that those gripes might not be representative of the state of the profession.
"The data suggest something much different than the conventional wisdom. In fact, teachers are far more autonomous -- and far more satisfied -- than most people believe," the authors write.
The pieces, released Tuesday and provided exclusively to The Huffington Post, provided a new analysis of federal teacher survey information from the 2011-12 school year and combined those responses with those of more recent teacher surveys. Authors Ulrich Boser, Robert Hanna and Kaitlin Pennington found that more than 90 percent of teachers say they have "a good or great deal of control" over choosing their teaching methods. And high percentages of teachers -- 89 percent on one survey, 82 percent on another -- say they're satisfied in the classroom. They also found that, despite the noise, 87 percent of first-year teachers remained in education for at least