Julie Cook was ready to leave teaching. She’d worked in both urban and suburban districts and in three different states. No matter where she taught, she ended up frustrated with the lack of autonomy given to, and professionalism expected from, teachers.
Top-down policies dictated what she taught, on what timeline, and how her students were assessed. Supervisors didn’t understand why she wanted to create a curriculum. And her colleagues treated teaching like a by-the-hour job, rather than a profession.
“They clocked in and out, presented information, and left the rest up to the powers that be,” she says.
In 2002, just as she’d finally decided to leave the field, Cook was offered a position at Souderton Charter School Collaborative, a teacher-powered school in Souderton, Pennsylvania.
“Teachers at our school have full or partial autonomy over our professional development, budget, curriculum, assessments, teacher evaluations, school policies, scheduling, and hiring,” she explains. “I was invited to create, decide, collaborate, and lead. I no longer felt crushed.”
She’s been teaching there ever since.
What Does It Mean To Be Teacher-Powered?
Despite the number of highly educated people who become teachers, the traditional system treats teachers like industrial workers rather than professionals. The bosses (superintendents and their staffs) send out directives that the workers (teachers) must follow while under the watchful eye of a foreman (principal). Even though teachers have little control over the decision-making process, they’re responsible for the product that comes off the assembly line (student learning).
In contrast, educators at teacher-powered schools take on truly professional roles, controlling the decisions that directly affect school operations and student learning. These schools are modeled after the partnerships common among most white-collar professions—where a group of professionals own and operate a firm or practice and are accountable for its success or failure.
Richard Ingersoll, professor of Education and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has done extensive research on teacher retention and quality. His work reveals that most teachers have little input into the decisions that affect their work, and this lack of control drives many out of the classroom. In 2014, Gallup reported that of 12 professions surveyed, teachers were the least likely to agree with the statement, “My opinion seems to matter at work.”
A recent report from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education shows that schools with higher levels of teacher leadership – the amount of input teachers have in school decision-making – and higher levels of instructional leadership – the extent to which school leaders focus on the core activities of teaching and learning – produce greater student achievement, making the teacher-powered model a win for students and teachers alike.
According to the report, many schools fail to emphasize the areas of instructional and teacher leadership that matter most for student achievement. For instance, schools often grant teachers authority over areas specific to the classroom, such as control over instructional practices, but the research shows that student achievement is more strongly correlated with the role of teacher decision-making in school-wide policy, particularly in establishing student discipline policies and crafting school improvement plans. The data suggests that when teachers have input into the larger decisions that affect a school’s climate and ethos, the school performs better.
Overall, the findings show that schools with both higher teacher accountability (an area of instructional leadership) and teacher decision-making (an area of teacher leadership) have higher student achievement, which indicates that school leaders should regard teachers as partners. Effective school leadership means holding teachers to high instructional standards while actively involving teachers in school-wide decision-making and fostering a shared vision among faculty and administration for the school.
The teacher-powered model embodies this concept.
Teacher-powered schools aren’t “anti-principal.” All teacher-powered schools have leaders. Usually, teacher teams select the leaders and hold them accountable for performance, deselecting them if their performance is unsatisfactory. Some schools have a principal, some have rotating lead teachers, and others have a teacher leadership committee. But the final decision-making authority lies with a collective group of teachers, and leaders are there to help carry out their decisions.
The advocacy group Education Evolving has identified 15 different autonomies associated with teacher-powered schools, including selecting and deselecting colleagues, controlling budgets, determining school-level policy, and others. But not all teacher teams want every autonomy.
Avalon Charter School in St. Paul, Minnesota, is one of those rare schools where educators have all 15. They make decisions as a group and all have some administrative duties, but they select two lead teachers to handle the bulk of administrative responsibilities, in exchange for a smaller teaching load. Teachers make all spending, compensation and teacher evaluation decisions; there’s no tenure, seniority or union. During the 2008 to 2011 recession, for instance, the faculty voted to cut their fringe benefits and went without cost of living raises; their sacrifices kept the school going during a difficult economic period.
The school uses “360-degree evaluations” where teachers evaluate one another, parents and students anonymously evaluate teachers and teachers evaluate the current leadership. The evaluation system is designed to support professional growth, but some teachers have been fired. However, the close working relationships inherent in the teacher-powered model means that usually faculty members who don’t mesh with the school’s culture opt to leave before they’re asked to.
Likewise, the school’s leaders use their staffing autonomy to hire people who understand the demanding yet rewarding nature of the teacher-powered model. As a result, teacher retention at Avalon hovers around 95% each year.
Growing The Teacher-Powered Movement: Spreading The Model From Public Charters To School Districts
Over the last decade, the number of teacher-powered schools in America has grown to 120. They are spread across 19 states, serving students from prekindergarten to age 21.
Prior to 2015, the majority were public charter schools, because charters have the autonomy teachers need to organize and run a school. However, in the last three years, there’s been a dramatic increase in the number of teacher-powered schools operating within traditional school districts.
The Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative, a collaborative effort between Center for Teaching Quality and Education Evolving, aims to inspire teacher teams to take charge in their schools and advises them on best practices.
“We have to remember that there are a lot of teachers who aren’t teaching in charters, who aren’t interested in starting their own school, but who want autonomy,” says Lars Esdal, executive director at Education Evolving. “So even if it’s a ‘lighter’ version of autonomy, so to speak, we want to support the needs of teachers in the district sector, too.”
Amy Junge, one of Esdal’s colleagues, explains that the goal of their work is to let teacher teams make the professional decision about how much autonomy they want, then help them to secure it from the powers that be. They can secure autonomy from the district in a variety of ways: memoranda of understanding, elect-to-work agreements, participating in innovation zones, and so on.
However, district schools run into barriers far more often than charters do. Local politics, the district’s openness to innovation, and the flexibility of local union leaders all influence whether teacher teams can successfully create and sustain a teacher-powered school.
“For many problems, school districts already have the solutions they need in the people working there, but the bureaucracy and culture prevent the district from accessing that talent,” Junge says. “It takes a shift in the mindset at the central office to trust the people at the schools.”
Change in district leadership is the biggest challenge for in-district teacher-powered schools. Unlike at charter schools, the loss of a supportive superintendent can endanger the autonomies granted to teacher teams.
For instance, teacher-powered pilot schools in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) had staffing autonomy, but after Superintendent John Deasy left, the re-establishment of the central control made their promises of autonomy little more than ink on paper.
Part of the problem in districts like LAUSD is that union contracts often require that districts continue to employ unplaced teachers. If not hired, these teachers sit in the district’s reserve pool, year after year, collecting their salaries and benefits. To save money, districts often force all principals to hire teachers from this pool, irrespective of the teacher’s quality or any staffing autonomy previously agreed upon.
Teacher-powered pilot schools in LAUSD have an elect-to-work agreement (EWA) written by teachers at the school. In theory, the EWA prevents forced placements of unwanted teachers. It outlines the expectations for teachers, including faithfulness to the school’s mission and pedagogical model, as well as the work required beyond what’s listed in the union contract. If teachers fail to meet these expectations, the principal can decline to offer them an EWA for the following year, effectively dismissing them back to the district’s pool. However, a teacher forced on a school isn’t required to sign the EWA or commit to the extra work or mission-driven vision that makes teacher-powered schools operate successfully.
“One of the autonomies we have is over hiring, except we don’t really,” said one principal. “We’re only one of the models in the larger system, and the needs of the system often outweigh the needs of our model. It is not directly stated that our autonomy is taken away from us, but it’s not honored, because if the district has teachers that they need to place, they will place them here.”
In a worst-case scenario, LAUSD force-placed a principal at a teacher-powered school, despite an agreement that the teacher team had the autonomy to select the principal. The principal tried to re-impose a traditional, hierarchal management style, and when the school’s founding teachers challenged him, he retaliated by refusing to offer them EWAs for the following year.
“There are just no statutes that protect teacher-led reforms,” another LAUSD teacher-powered principal concluded.
Despite the growing support for the teacher-powered schools among district-employed educators, the model remains easier to implement and more sustainable in a truly decentralized system—a system of public charter schools.
