Teacher-Led Schools: The Mouse and Hippo
Groups of teachers founding charters, taking over failing schools, or simply creating different ones is a smart idea. It is worthwhile and needs much support to spread since teachers can design, implement, and administer such schools as well as if not better than policymakers hiring principals and high-paid consultants. After all, one doesn’t have to know too much history of U.S. public schools to remember that teachers ran their own schools when rural one-room schoolhouses prevailed a century and a half ago and before principals (remember the first ones were called principal-teachers). Nonetheless, there are some facts that cannot be ignored.
Second, as these teacher-run schools get established, they will be a small (but nonetheless, important )contribution to the necessary mix of schools needed to improve urban districts. Even though :Os Angeles, Detroit, and other districts have authorized teacher-run schools there are still less than 100 across the nation (of about 100,000 public schools). This is where the mouse and hippo enters the picture.
New schools including charters come from policymakers who decide that such schools can alter what usually occurs in traditional schools. Politicians and policymakers create most schools. The hippo. And teacher-run schools, the mouse, will always be small in comparison but, as in the Mike Twohy story, can be both a friend and a guide to “good” schooling.
Such teacher-led schools will mobilize many teachers (Teach for America graduates, deeply committed novices and a chunk of mid-career professionals) and parents to form democratic cooperatives (mostly charters) and run schools Continue reading: Teacher-Led Schools: The Mouse and Hippo | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice