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Find more Kappan articles in the The Role of Teachers in Establishing a Quality-Assurance System The STAR program in Seattle and similar efforts in other communities reflect a recognition that teachers must take greater responsibility for the quality of the work of their peers. Such efforts also acknowledge, Mr. Cameron points out, that teacher unions have a legitimate role to play in helping them do it.
MORE THAN 30 years ago, I began my teaching career in my home state of Michigan. It was a different time. More than that, it was a different epoch. The Michigan where I started teaching was dominated by mass-production industry, the same industry that had defined the economy of the state and the nation for most of the century. Today, that economy - based on uniform, standardized mass production - no longer exists. Our world has been transformed. But our schools haven't. Any discussion about educational quality, I believe, needs to recognize this central reality of our time. The schools that worked for America in the Industrial Age are not the schools we need for America in the Information Age. Teachers all across the U.S. are beginning to understand this new reality. They are redefining their roles, striding and sometimes stumbling into incredibly exhilarating new learning territory. They need a system that supports these exploratory efforts. Whether they get such a system or not is the great unanswered educational question of our time. What are the new roles teachers need to play? What sort of system will give teachers the support essential to achieving quality? To consider these questions, we need to start, as my teaching career started, with the America of the Industrial Age. Pedagogy by Prescription The mass-production America I knew as a young teacher was symbolized by the mighty manufacturing fortresses of the auto industry. Employees by the hundreds of thousands labored in workplaces that had been rigorously standardized to achieve uniform quality. These workers were closely supervised and subject to strict inspection procedures. For management, improving productivity meant engineering new mechanical designs, not strengthening the applied knowledge of the work force. For many years this controlling, prescriptive approach to organizing work suited America just fine. American products dominated world markets. Not surprisingly, schools came to reflect the processes and culture of manufacturing. Administrators stressed standardization and rote response. Rigid curricula were designed to "pour" knowledge into students, as if they were empty vessels that only needed filling. Students were considered identical, homogeneous "raw materials" in a standardized process of educational production. In Industrial Age schools, both parents and teachers expected students to conform. If they did, a solid future in a standardized, stable economy awaited them. If they did not, there was no comfortable place for them in America's schools. Enter the Information Age The certainties of the Industrial Age that shaped the schools where I started teaching have long since disappeared, and with them have gone millions of assembly-line jobs that once seemed destined to be eternally available. New enterprises and new production processes are emerging as we make the wrenching transition from an age dominated by manufacturing to an age that is increasingly interconnected and dominated by information. In this new universe, mass markets are no longer uniform and undifferentiated. The competitive edge goes to those enterprises that can adapt quickly to changing tastes and needs, that can give different things to different consumers. Centralized, top-down production hierarchies don't work very well in this new marketing environment. Adaptive operations that are more democratic and decentralized are now on the rise. The new emphasis is on teamwork and shared decision making. In the best new enterprises, the command-and-control ethos of the industrial era no longer drives life and labor. In fact, it is often counterproductive. The transformation of America from an agricultural nation to an industrial one stretched over long decades. The transformation to the Information Age has zipped along at mind-numbing speeds. As could be expected, schools are scrambling to catch up and are still struggling to shed the systemic models of the Industrial Age. We can see this tension in the pages of our school yearbooks. Compare today's yearbooks with those published 30 and 40 years ago. The differences are startling. The school-by-school homogeneity that was the hallmark of the Fifties has given way to a rich cultural diversity. Young people from a wide range of racial and ethnic backgrounds fill today's yearbook pages, and their families rightfully expect schools to address their individual needs. This expectation is defining a new philosophy for education: schools should adapt to the needs of students, not students to the needs of schools. In this new environment, schools can no longer view students as a homogeneous group with identical learning needs. One size no longer fits all. Quality, Not Hierarchy If one educational size no longer fits all, then one prescribed set of lessons, tests, and procedures can no longer fit all either. But our current education system is structured just as if yesterday's verities of top-down standardization were still valid today. At the state level, legislatures and departments of education enact laws and develop regulations that set standards and curriculum frameworks. At the local level, district administrations filter state directives and mandates through a bureaucracy of traditional systems and practices. At the building level, information and communication flow between building administrators and central offices. That communication carries top-down directives designed to affect how teachers practice and what students achieve. At the "bottom" level - the classroom - teaching takes place as an isolated activity practiced by individuals in response to (and even in spite of) directives filtering down through the hierarchy of decision makers. Standards, testing, and other reforms du jour are met with resignation and grudging compliance by classroom teachers, exasperated by mandated one-size-fits-all approaches that ill serve their students. In essence, the entire education system sits above classrooms instead of supporting the work that teachers need to do within them. Ours remains a hierarchical system in which decisions directly affecting classrooms are instituted most often by those who never see teachers, students, or parents. This hierarchical system might have made sense when students could be treated as a homogeneous mass. But it makes no sense today. Centralized bureaucratic bodies, whether in state capitals or district offices, cannot possibly discern what diverse, individual students need to learn. Only teachers and administrators prepared to make judgments about students and what they need to achieve can help students achieve quality learning outcomes. Quality demands a system that supports the ability of teachers to make these judgments, just as the 21st-century American work force will have to be entrusted with decision-making power. In short, we need to make the transition from a prescriptive system to a supportive one. In that effort, we can learn from the changes that have taken place in corporate cultures and processes. If education decision makers were to follow the lead of the best new business enterprises, they would flatten the hierarchy of the education system and decentralize responsibility and accountability as close as possible to the "clients": students and parents. The education system - and all its parts - would aspire to support and not dominate that most critical relationship between teacher and student. Changing Behaviors At the National Education Association (NEA), we believe that the education system must change. But this system - the web of structures, behaviors, and assumptions that determine how the stakeholders in education both act and react - includes us. As teacher unions operating at the national, state, and local level, we too need to change. We need to recognize that our traditional efforts to ensure quality are no longer adequate to present-day demands. Our efforts to ensure school quality, for instance, have historically been based on the assumption that a teacher - appropriately licensed and certified - has all that is needed to practice successfully. We have assumed that once a teacher was licensed, then that teacher was set - essentially forever. This assumption is no longer valid - if it ever was. We continue to believe that all prospective teachers must be rigorously prepared, both in pedagogy and in subject matter. But preparing teachers for high-quality careers cannot stop with this initial preparation. In the 21st century, quality assurance means creating a new system that encourages teachers to pursue the lifelong goal of perfecting their craft. What priorities should guide us as we endeavor to create this new quality-assurance system? We offer three guiding principles: · We must redefine the professional development of teachers. Training sessions and workshops prepared by a centralized agency are of little relevance to the actual classroom work of teachers. For professional development to be meaningful, decisions on the resources earmarked for professional development ought to be made at the building level. · We must place more direct responsibility for the quality of student achievement in the hands of teachers. Teachers should be given more discretion in designing appropriate learning strategies for the children in their classrooms. Standards, whether designed at the state or local level, should provide the "what"; teachers, drawing on their professional knowledge, should design the "how." · Teachers and teacher organizations must take greater responsibility for the quality of the teaching force. To help schools fulfill their public trust, teacher unions should broaden their responsibility for what their members know and can do. We in the NEA are proud of the work we have done at the state and national levels to develop standards for teacher preparation and practice, through cooperation with such long-standing bodies as the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) and with such new organizations as the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. These efforts are crucial and should be supported at the state and local levels. Improved teacher preparation and development are the keys to increased student achievement. For too long, teacher preparation and development have been at the bottom of our lists of priorities in education, instead of at the top. Our society ensures that all hair stylists meet certain requirements; we cannot say the same about our teachers. NCATE is the profession's accountability mechanism; we need to support the reform of teacher preparation through accreditation of all schools of education. Our efforts to enhance the quality of the teaching profession also need to be expanded into professional development activities at the local school district level. In the traditional, adversarial model of labor/management relations, there is no expectation that teacher organizations will take on this responsibility. In that traditional model, the administration hires, evaluates, and remediates (or, in worst cases, terminates). The union rarely has any role in ensuring the quality of individual practitioners - until it is called on to defend a teacher whose employment is in jeopardy. In short, under the traditional model of labor relations, no teachers at the local level are truly responsible for the ongoing professional development of their peers - or for ensuring the quality of their practice. Fortunately, NEA members are now developing alternative models. In Seattle, the STAR (Staff Training, Assistance, and Review) program has created a cadre of "consulting teachers" who serve as peer coaches and mentors, both for new teachers and for veteran teachers experiencing difficulties in their classrooms. Thanks to the STAR effort, Seattle teachers and school officials are no longer playing the blame game. The administration isn't blaming the local NEA affiliate for making it impossible to fire "bad" teachers, and the NEA local isn't blaming principals for failing to properly supervise and evaluate teachers. Instead, the administration and our NEA local in Seattle have mutually designed a program that helps teachers succeed. New teachers and veteran teachers alike are provided access to professional development and peer counseling designed to enhance their practice. This access does not always guarantee improved practice, but we have managed to counsel a small number of Seattle teachers - both tenured and nontenured - out of the profession. The Seattle effort and similar programs emerging in other communities reflect a recognition that teachers must take greater responsibility for the quality of the work of their peers. And these efforts acknowledge that teacher unions have a legitimate role to play in helping them do it. If we build on the Seattle model and the guiding principles listed above, we can create a truly supportive, not prescriptive, system. This system will ensure that all teachers hired are certified to teach in the area for which they are being hired; that teachers are treated as professionals who have a valuable body of professional knowledge and the ability to make critical decisions; that the resources and flexibility exist to design effective peer mentoring programs for new teachers and teachers who need extra support; and that teachers are offered the resources for and access to ongoing professional development opportunities that meet individual and building-level needs. This is the kind of quality-assurance system we need for the Information Age. This is the system that NEA members are eager to help create. DON CAMERON is executive director of the National Education Association, Washington, D.C. |
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