Teacher Autonomy
Recently, I was talking with a friend who works as an educator for a D.C. public school, and they told me something that got me thinking. Apparently D.C. public schools have revoked the right of the principal to issue suspension; this right is now reserved for the city-level council. All this is reportedly in an effort to cut down on the number of suspensions, but also to reduce institutional racism present in suspension rates. This solution is far from ideal, as it does not address the root cause of suspensions. Though it remains to be seen if it will have the desired effect on uneven suspension rates between white and minority students. However, this lack of autonomy at the lower levels is a hallmark of a larger issue with schools.
Teachers should be given more autonomy in the classroom. In order for individualized attention at the student level, power has to be shifted downward, towards the educators interacting with the students on the front lines, rather than shifted upward. Individualized attention is one of the keys to improving the education system in America. In order for a student to succeed, we have to stop applying cookie cutter rules to education. Not every child learns at the same pace, or in the same way. This means that it is up to the teachers to find individual solutions to individual problems. And for that level of individual attention, there are some areas that need power consolidated at the front line.
Discipline
As mentioned above, this is one area that teachers are seeing less and less control. While it may seem inconsequential who gives out detentions, it boils down to a matter of respect, familiarity and control. Students have to know that teachers have the ability to enact consequences for the students’ actions. A teacher’s ability to hand out detention slips or write demerits commands a certain respect teachers need to maintain authority in their classroom. Also, a teacher knows their students better than a school board who had never known the student existed until an incident occurred. This means teachers have the knowledge and ability to help the punishment match the needs of the student. Lastly, teachers need to be able to control their classroom. If a student feels they can get away with acting up in class, and the teacher cannot do anything about it, not only is the teacher not able to help that student learn, but they do not have an effective environment for instructing the other students. To be clear, I am not saying teachers should have total control over when and how to punish students; rather teachers should have the ability to choose if and when a student needs disciplinary action.
Assessment
Giving teachers more authority in the realm of testing is going to be a harder change than that of discipline. Unfortunately, testing methods today mean many students get left behind, especially students who do not test well. Grades tend to reflect performance on exams and occasionally include a percentage for participation. However, there are many things that are not represented in final letter grades, the kinds of things only teachers see. Things like dedication, improvement, and social interactions. I feel teachers should be allowed to include measures of these things in a student’s final grade. How this would be instituted, and what form it would take is unclear, though there are a number of tangibles I could envision being part of the final solution. Such as, a separate grade for every class to reflect those other qualities, or include this things as a percentage in a single final grade that also incorporates hard knowledge. Those less tangible qualities will also need an impartial scale or metric for teachers to grade by, so that students receive comparable treatment across teachers and classes. Or perhaps it could be something as simple as teachers being required to write notes to accompany students’ final grades explaining those things that letter grades cannot reflect. The goal in giving teachers more autonomy in assessments is to ensure that everything a teacher sees in a student is communicated to anyone reading that student’s report card, allowing for the world to have a more holistic view of students.
Curriculum
Perhaps most the most obvious area for a teacher to exercise autonomy, is in the delivery of content to their students. Teachers should have free reign to design their class sessions to match their teaching style as well as the students’ needs, putting the students first. Many teachers I had growing up were able to add their own twist to how they conducted class, and the more ‘out of the box’ the lesson style was, the more likely I was to remember. I can still picture my sixth grade math class and singing the division rules to the tune of “Wheels on the Bus.” Lectures are still very common in lots of classrooms today. Unfortunately, lectures are not very effective for students’ retention of the material. A teacher knows their students and may know other methods (whether it is including more visuals or turning pop quizzes into projects) that may be more effective for teaching a student. Of course, this change would pose its own problems. Firstly, it would probably require more capital to run a classroom that included more arts and crafts than one that only used lectures to teach. Secondly, it is hard to find one teaching method that works for ~30 students. While the problem of money and school budgets is a larger one that also needs to be addressed, all I am going to say here is that schools need more funding, and more equitable funding, from their local and federal governments. As for matching teaching methods to students, there is no perfect solution. But we are already forcing thousands and thousands of students to learn in ways counter to their hardwiring, so giving the authority to teachers to do their best to make sure every student passed is perhaps the best solution we have for now.
A lot of these solutions involve all teachers being, in a word, perfect. They can’t have biases against students, have to have the dedication and commitment to see things through, the passion to better their students lives, and the list goes on and on. I fully acknowledge that not every teacher is like that, and there may be some who are even the opposite. Which means not only does the system have to change, but the way we treat and train teachers needs revision.
This could means a number of changes in school systems. First, teachers’ pay should be increased. We need to create more incentive for people to teach. It’s hard to advocate giving more autonomy, and thus more responsibility, to teachers who already work far more than they should given their hours in and outside the classroom. America is facing a shortage of teachers in large part because the job we ask of them is too demanding given the pay we are offering. If we truly want the best education for our children, then we need to be liking to divert more government money towards paying for a quality education. Second, this may mean teacher should have yearly or quarterly reviews in which they update their superiors on everything from when and why they decided students needed detention to what they are doing to go the extra mile in their curriculum. Lastly, it would mean how we vet and train our teachers would need to change. Not drastically, hopefully, but we want to instill in our teachers the ideas and values that will ensure the students come first. Hopefully, with the right incentives, institutions, and training, teachers will find themselves doing everything they can to make classrooms a more valuable place for their students to be.
