Vergara v. California highlights the need for a teacher-powered educational strategy
The Vergara v. California ruling that every student has a Constitutional right to learn from an effective teacher has been labeled bold — but it actually mirrors the counterproductive strategy long dominating reform efforts that ignores teachers’ professional expertise and then blames them for poor student outcomes.
This decision pits unions against reformers. However, we’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t believe that every student deserves an effective teacher and high-quality education.
Unfortunately, the current system of ad hoc federal and state mandates often prevents teachers from achieving this goal. As a result, we inadvertently set teachers, and the students they serve, up for failure.
Carrie Bakken
Scapegoating teachers achieves nothing, and more top-down mandates won’t solve this disconnect between “teacher effectiveness” and the authority teachers need to actually be effective. Instead, we should ask, “Under what conditions will teachers accept accountability?” And, in answering that question, we must think laterally, not vertically, about a new approach that harnesses the collective expertise of teachers, principals and local leaders, and engages them as partners and leaders in ensuring that all children receive a top-notch education.
This teacher-powered strategy suggests that when teachers secure the autonomy to work together to design, lead and make the decisions for student and school success, they also accept the accountability for student and school success. Where state, district, and other leaders are open to getting at accountability by increasing teachers’ authority, we see teams of teachers using their expertise and know-how to make important decisions for their students and innovate education from within.
A teacher-powered strategy is more than just an idea. We’ve seen it thrive in more than 60 schools across the country, in rural, urban, district, public charter and other school settings, and including my school – Avalon School – which serves a diverse cross-section of students in the Twin Cities area. In addition to developing and executing a strong project-based learning curriculum for our students, Avalon’s 17 teachers share responsibility in deciding everything from our own evaluations to the school budget to strategic planning. Not only do our students perform better on assessments than their peers across St. Paul Public Schools, this unique opportunity to lead without leaving the profession has resulted in a 95 percent teacher retention rate for Avalon.
Avalon School and other teacher-powered schools across the country have taken the initiative to create a better learning environment for students while also making teaching a better job for teachers. As Kim Farris-Berg and Ed Dirkswager recently found in Trusting Teachers with School Success, which studied many of these teacher-powered schools in-depth, when teachers are directly Vergara v. California highlights the need for a teacher-powered educational strategy | The Hechinger Report: