The Itinerant Schoolmaster as a Model for Reform
Should teachers be free agents who take their skills to the highest bidder? Or should we encourage them to stay put in stable teams where they work in concert to improve their students’ performance?
A thoughtful reader of this blog came out in favor of the former vision. Let great teachers take their talents on the road. Then let the market decide their value.
A different vision appeared in yesterday’s New York Times. In Boston, the Times reports, struggling schools are hiring entire teams of experience teachers to ground their turnaround efforts. The principal of one such school said the strategy “had provided such a strong core of teachers to anchor the school that it helped him recruit other experienced teachers. And it has allowed him to take a chance” on new teachers.
I prefer this vision to the free agent vision. The best schools I’ve seen–wealthy or poor–have strong teams of great teachers in place, and those teams are more than the sum of their parts. I’ve also seen excellent departments unravel when they lose their core of experienced teachers. Even platoons of great new teachers couldn’t quickly knit those departments together again.
I’ll admit that the choice I pose in my first paragraph is a bit too pat. Free agency can be a good thing, and it doesn’t have to come at the expense of collaboration. And the desire to build strong teams shouldn’t blind us to the differences between teachers.
But it worries me that so much of the current reform discussion assumes that the individual teacher is the only unit of analysis. Sure, everyone loves collaboration, but how many people pundits have all that much to say about it?
And is free agency really the latest and greatest idea to emerge from the business community? Many of the business folk I speak with talk about teamwork, distributed leadership and even stability. Some reformers tend to quote rather more selectively from the Bible of business practice.
Of course, not enough schools with stable staff foster true collaboration. People tend to blame the staff for the effects of a poor teaching climate. But the answer is not to assume that scads of new teachers will magically solve the problem, as marvelous as those new teachers may be. We have to focus on climate and conditions as well as on talent.
Want some ideas of where to begin? Check out the National Staff Development Council. (NSDC is a member of the Learning First Alliance, but I’d be plugging them even if they weren’t.)
Update (8/9/2010): After I wrote this piece, I saw another, much more nuanced, comment from my thoughtful reader. I don’t agree with everything he writes there, either, but that response will have to be for another day….
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