Teachers Running Schools

Winnie Hu reports on a bit of a trendlet toward teachers taking over the management of schools. The article injects some skepticism about the merits of the trend, which is all well-taken, but I think can go too far. The bottom line is that we have a lot of schools that don’t perform well, and we have a lot of ideas about how to improve them that most incumbent teachers think are unsound. So on the one hand we have some dissident teachers going out and becoming leaders of new charter schools. And on the other hand, we have some more traditionally union-aligned teachers saying “we know how classrooms work, give us the authority and we’ll show you how it’s done.”

These both seem like reasonable responses to the situation, and I think wise policymakers will allow—indeed, encourage—both trends to continue. The important thing, however, is to follow up with rigorous measurements of what’s actually happening so that we can shut down failures and allow successes to continue.