Teachers as Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education

In Teachers as Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education, Edward J. Dirkswager investigates how being owners, rather than employees, can give teachers control of their professional activity, including full responsibility and accountability for creating and sustaining high performing learning communities.

Teachers as Owners: A Key to Revitalizing Public Education, edited by Edward J. Dirkswager, has the following book description at Amazon.com:

What if teachers were owners, not employees? Teacher-ownership is a revolutionary way to put excitement and meaning back into the teaching profession and revitalize public education. This book demonstrates how being owners rather than employees can give teachers control of their professional activity, including full responsibility and accountability for creating and sustaining high performing learning communities. It presents examples of teacher-ownership in practice and provides practical models for those who would like to experience the professional satisfaction found in ownership.

Like doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, teachers have the same opportunity to work for themselves through ownership of professional partnerships. In a professional partnership, teachers are the leaders and decision makers. They control their own work and their own relationships to students, including determining curricula, setting budgets, choosing the level of technology available to students, determining their own salaries, selecting their colleagues, monitoring performance, and hiring administrators to work for them, not vice versa.

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Deciding whether to formally organize the teacher team