Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
—Jacques Barzun
For years teachers and their professional expertise have been devalued by politicians and corporate leaders who have been instrumental in inflicting failed educational policies like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top on our schools and those who work in them. These policies, in addition to being punitive, have dealt with teachers as if they were technicians who have to be told how to do their jobs and carefully monitored to ensure that they are in fact doing what they have been instructed to do. Thus we have the Common Core Standards that tell teachers what to teach and a proliferation of standardized tests that check to see that they are doing what they’ve been told—and doing it to the policymakers satisfaction.
Undervalued in all of this are the teacher’s common sense, knowledge, experience and intuition about what works effectively with individual students during different lessons and classroom activities. Instead of respecting this expertise, studying how it is developed and finding ways to nurture and further develop it, we get prescriptions like this one from Grover “Russ” Whitehurst: “We are unlikely to get dramatically better at educating students until we have a cadre of researchers whose job is to engineer more efficient and effective processes for carrying out the work of schools.”
While educational research can be useful in helping teachers decide what strategies they might use in a classroom, as David Berliner has pointed out, it has its limitations and it definitely should not be used to “engineer” classroom teaching practices. As the wise old saying notes, “there is no substitute for the brew master’s nose,” and in a classroom the brew master is the teacher.
The Starting Point for Showing Respect
In Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink demonstrates that the way to get the best from those who work for us is to is to stop trying to control, coerce and direct them; instead, demonstrate trust in them by giving them more autonomy in what they are doing. That encourages their creativity and mastery over what they are doing. Finland, one of the countries whose students’ test scores policymakers envy, discovered that reality years ago and it’s one of the major reasons their schools are so successful.
One Finnish educator describing the approach taken by the Finns told American educator William Doyle: "Our mission as adults is to protect our children from politicians. We also have an ethical and moral responsibility to tell businesspeople to stay out of our building." He was, Doyle recognized, speaking somewhat tongue in cheek, but his point was that in Finland it is educators not politicians or businesspeople who are best suited to determine educational policy and practice. That’s respect.
What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than
that of the man who instructs the rising generation.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act presents an opportunity to give our teachers the autonomy and respect they deserve. Will state and local public officials and business leaders be smart enough to seize that opportunity? We’ll see.