Teacher Led Schools

BY LESLIE McCRACKEN

TPPs help to professionalize teaching. All the ideas for “school improvement” and “education reform” assume that teachers must remain employees and that an administrator, such as a principal, must be in charge. But it is clearly conceivable for teachers like doctors, lawyers, and other professionals to work with partners in groups they collectively own; serving a client in an arrangement that gives them both the autonomy we associate with professionalism and the accountability we expect from professionals. When a TPP accepts responsibility to manage, or arrange for the management of, one or more schools, the teachers are directly responsible and accountable for what happens at the learning communities they serve.

~ Education|Evolving.

Are we teacher professionals, or are we not professionals? Should bureaucracy and imbedded policy govern the way we teach our students?  Who best determines the needs of students: policy makers and administration who rarely make it into the classroom or the teachers who spend all day every day attempting to meet the academic needs of their students?

Up until the mid 19^th century, education in the Black community was ardently our responsibility when leaders formulated small schools in which to house our children, leaders who hoped that we could carve out a place of opportunity within a system that overlooked us.  The global population could not care less whether our children had any level of formal education.  Teaching children of color was, simply put our problem.  We had no democracy let alone a bureaucracy that would mandate any level of formal education or academic equality for children of color.  Our opportunity to learn was based on the intellectual property our teachers held and their ability to disseminate it among youth.

Fast forward to the 21^st century, where racial and socio-economics still determine our academic worth, but in this new millennium version of privilege, education is now laden with insurmountable governmental jurisdiction, policy, and regulations.  While most public schools are faced with under funding and budget cuts, the top heavy administration holds all the power.  And like the great and powerful Oz, it determines what is taught in classrooms, and what is omitted.  The endless vortex of academic hierarchy is one likened to the black hole.  However, some teachers are pulling together and taking back the power; and at the crux of this argument is a complex yet refreshing alternative, teacher professional partnership or TPPs.

A teacher professional partnership or (TPP) is a formal entity, formed and owned by teachers to provide educational services. Teachers are in charge, and they manage or arrange for the management of the schools or services provided. The school district is not managing the school; neither is a district-appointed single leader  (e.g., a principal).  Essentially the TPP model is one that establishes a professional group of teachers as the formal and centralized authority of the school that formally accepts the responsibility for the success of learning in a whole school or a department of a school, including the administration.  It is an idea that divests itself of the traditional paradigm suggesting that teachers must be managed.

Contracts, waivers, and other arrangements allow TPPs to control their own work inside the schools they serve, which can include determining curriculum, setting the budget, choosing the level of technology available to students, selecting their colleagues, monitoring performance, hiring administrators to work for them, and setting their own salaries.

The precursory question on the minds of Administrators is this: Can Teacher partnerships or cooperatives be fundamentally effective?  After all, some could argue that the spirit of cooperation is credited with forming the very foundation of American civic life.   But can this model work within academia?

The probability of TPPs eradicating or replacing school district hierarchies and governance is at best slim; however, analyzing whether it is possible for groups of teachers to run successful schools without formal administrators and in the process increase the degrees of autonomy and flexibility in their own jobs could prove persuasive.  And if one further inquires as to whether there are lessons to be learned from the ability of those making up TPPs to create coherence without managerial authority or organizational routines, then the pool of possibility runs deep.

Creators of the concept for a Teacher Professional Partnership, a concept that is championed by Education|Evolving, a joint venture of the Center for Policy Studies and Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, suggests the following:

TPPs often want to maximize their professional talents and to create, through their service, high-performing learning communities. They want the personal satisfaction of owning and operating a business that allows them to maximize their teaching (and in some cases management) experience. Rather than working for an administrator, they want to work for themselves. They also seek the changes in culture (evident in the behaviors of teachers, parents, and students) that can result when a TPP is delegated the authority to manage, or arrange for the management of, a school.

Can TPPs radically change what happens inside schools? Arguably, when teachers are responsible for their school, they realize that their success depends on their students.  That realization can be described as a relationship economy–united by a single idea–one where each significant contributor has a level of ostensible accountability. This building of an educational eco system, as it were, contributes to a ripple effect translating into learning outcomes, parent/student contributions, and collective school governance. This symbiotic relationship that would evolve within teacher peer development would only enhance the academic eco systems in which they serve.

Some would argue that teacher-led schools exchange unitary democracy for central authority.  The idea of unitary democracy is that the goals of the cooperative enterprise are more important than individual positions.  Successful teacher-led schools formulate practices that cause both students and teachers to delve deeply into if and how the process of learning is taking place. These pedagogical rubrics develop the normative indicators of achievement and progress.  The extent to which adults and students understand, internalize, and implement these processes directly correlates to their capacity for organizational learning: They are ingenious when they succeed and delusional when they don’t.

According to Charles Taylor, Kerchner Research Professor in the School Educational Studies at the Claremont Graduate University and a specialist in educational organizations, educational policy, and teacher unions, “ there are lessons in these cooperatives for the reform of district schools.  The most obvious is that students are capable of much more self-control than most schools expect of them.  While there are many reasons that urban high schools appear just on the ragged edge of anarchy, organizing the school around external control rather than internal control of students is counterproductive.  It directs resources to control that would better be spent on learning and teaching.  And it fails to teach the important twenty first Century skills of collaboration, and solving hard-to-define problems.”

So, then the question becomes are faculty and staff much more capable of designing their own work and of understanding changing circumstances than the central command and control would suggest?  And if so, why aren’t these types of schools popping up all over the country?

Just to be clear, a cooperative enterprise is not simply a place where individual teachers do as they wish, and teach as they wish.  In fact, historically there has been more room for individuals to hide-out in conventional bureaucracies than there is in cooperative enterprises.  Shielded by the classroom door, the lack of supervision, and the union contract, teachers often gain substantial operating independence so long as they do not disobey direct orders or challenge superiors.  In a cooperative, the obligation for joint action, for understanding how the parts of a curriculum fit together and how “my” job fits those of others become imperative.  Those skills are not easily learned, and they put a premium on picking a good team at the beginning and sustaining it over time.

Education|Evolving states that, “All the efforts at improving teaching and the status and performance of teachers – about recruitment and retention and compensation and development –take place within the notion of teachers as employees. Every other profession offers at least the option for its members to own and control their work. It is possible to offer this also to teachers. …”

Site-based management, teacher empowerment, teacher-teams, and team-teaching and “teacher leadership” without the constructs of the administrator/teacher, boss/worker, arrangement which are what people have always known in education. The rule has been that if a person wants to be a teacher that person must be an employee. So people assume that teachers must be managed; then administration struggles to create “professional” roles within that paradigm–and often not very successfully.

Teachers may not all love the administrative work, but some teachers are willing to collectively accept it and to do it (or hire/arrange for someone else to do it) if that is what’s required for them to get the authority and responsibility for the school. The administrative work is a trade-off for the freedom to organize the school, and the opportunity to have a truly professional role and stake.

When queried about whether they would be willing to migrate from the traditional district administration to a TPP model, some teachers gave surprising answers.  The Public Agenda’s survey of teachers in 2003 asked a national sample of teachers this question: “How interested would you be in working in a charter school run and managed by teachers?” Fifth-eight percent of teachers said they would be somewhat or very interested; 65 percent of the under-five-year teachers and 50 percent of the over-20-year teachers.

TPPs help to professionalize teaching. All the ideas for ‘school improvement’ and ‘education reform’ assume that teachers must remain employees and that an administrator, such as a principal, must be in charge. But it is clearly conceivable for teachers like doctors, lawyers, and other professionals to work with partners in groups they collectively own; serving a client in an arrangement that gives them both the autonomy we associate with professionalism and the accountability we expect from professionals. When a TPP accepts responsibility to manage, or arrange for the management of, one or more schools, the teachers are directly responsible and accountable for what happens at the learning communities they serve.

~ Education|Evolving.

Some TPPs appoint one person to be a “lead teacher” to act as the chief liaison between the TPP and the boards of the schools they serve (among other duties). The administrator and lead teachers are not, however, “bosses”. Calling the appointed person a lead teacher  is role-differentiation without hierarchy.

When people first hear of the TPP notion, what immediately appears is the difference between the structures of leadership.  Education has a single-leader model: one person, the “principal,” who is—in theory—both the professional leader and the administrative leader. This notion of a single person being best in both these different roles could in fact be something of an overstatement.

As of March 2009, there were 15 TPPs serving 21 chartered schools. They were in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (13 TPPs serving 13 respective schools), and Minnesota (2 TPP serving 12 school sites throughout the state). The oldest is EdVisions Cooperative in Minnesota, which has operated since 1994. All 15 TPPs serve chartered schools, but a TPP could serve any kind of school. There were also at least 3 TPPs serving private and independent schools in California.

Our nation was once a pioneer in providing free public education to all citizens. Now we are ranked behind many industrialized nations in several educational metrics. Like the phoenix, our education system must be reborn to meet the needs of future generations.

Education reform is the new civil rights movement of our time. All of our nation’s ills will not be solved until we fix our education system.