Improving, empowering, dismantling

Public Interest, Summer, 2000 by Chester E. Finn, Marci Kanstoroom

EVERYONE agrees that getting and keeping good teachers is key to improving America's schools. How to accomplish this goal, however, is a matter of significant disagreement. While America is blessed with many fine teachers, we don't have enough of them--a problem that is more acute in certain subjects than others, and one that is made even more painfully evident by actual teacher shortages in some communities across the nation.

In devising solutions to the problem of teacher quality, policy makers have put forward three basic approaches: the regulatory approach, which seeks more centralized regulation of how teachers are trained and who gets to teach; the reformist approach, which gives principals the authority to run their own schools--including the hiring and firing of teachers--and then holds them strictly accountable for student performance; and the spending approach, which aims to attract better teachers by raising salaries.

The regulatory strategy is bankrupt. Teacher certification is no guarantee of good teaching, and its greatest effect has been to keep many fine prospective teachers from ever entering America's classrooms. The latest regulatory proposals, favored most prominently by Linda Darling-Hammond of the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future (NCTAF), continue further down this failed path of regulating teacher "inputs" (credentials) rather than teacher "outputs" (student performance).

By contrast, the reformist approach would deregulate the teacher certification process, empower principals to make crucial decisions about faculty and curriculum, and hold them accountable for student performance. To attract and keep good principals and good teachers, however, states and communities must give them the authority and compensation they deserve. For this reason, the reformist approach and the spending approach, are not mutually exclusive but complementary strategies for improving teacher quality. In a reformed system, principals would have the means to reward good teachers--a power that current uniform salary schedules deny them. By contrast, more spending without deregulation is likely to be ineffectual, and may even strengthen an education establishment that has proven itself a failure.

Across the United States, the reformist approach is beginning to take hold. After a series of unsuccessful attempts in the 1980s to boost academic achievement by clamping additional regulations on the public schools--three years of high school science instead of two, so many minutes of homework per day, new reading curricula, etc.--many states and communities are now experimenting with freedom, competition, and accountability for student performance. In this spirit, many communities have jettisoned the "one best system" view of education reform. Instead, they authorize individual schools to make key decisions about schedules, curriculum, and personnel, while empowering families to select those schools that best suit their children. Monitoring academic performance and making performance records public are also important parts of the reform agenda. The country's charter schools, almost 2,000 now, are perhaps the most vivid example of this effort to improve education through deregulation. This approach trusts p rincipals to run schools and parents to choose the best schools for their children, while at the same time using statewide academic standards and tests to audit and report on actual achievement.

For school reform to succeed, principals must become the CEOs of their schools. Each school--and the person running it--must be held accountable for academic results. Schools should be rewarded (accolades, greater resources, staff promotions, etc.) when they succeed and "intervened in" if they fail. Such accountability only makes sense, however, if principals have the authority to hire the best teachers, manage the school's resources, and build the kind of community of learning that can deliver on its responsibility of educating America's children.

Certifying bad teachers

Recent studies in Tennessee, Boston, and Dallas all find dramatic differences between the performance of youngsters assigned to the best teachers and those assigned to the worst. Clearly, school reform will not succeed unless more teachers have the knowledge and skills to help all their pupils meet high standards. Yet many teachers are not ready to meet this challenge. As many as two million new teachers must be hired in the next decade, and it is reported that a "bidding war" is already underway as states and communities vie to attract more qualified people to their classrooms. Sadly, our present system for recruiting, preparing, and deploying teachers is not up to this dual challenge of quality and quantity.

For decades, the dominant approach to quality control for teachers has been state regulation of teacher certification, which mostly means that all public school teachers are required to graduate from an approved teacher-education school. Teaching candidates typically take courses in "child development," the "foundations of education," "classroom diversity," and so on. Practice teaching is ordinarily required (and is the part that teachers generally find most valuable). There may also be a test of basic skills. But at the center of state-approved, state-regulated teacher education is the study of "pedagogy," which predictably creates a teaching force that is heavily credentialed in various methodologies but not content.