Conventional wisdom about the past decade of education reforms has been that a number of policies have reduced teachers’ autonomy and constrained how and what they teach. Whether it is blamed on No Child Left Behind, Common Core, the meddling district, the scripted curriculum, or the foolish local principal, the widely held belief is that teachers have been losing their autonomy. My colleague Rick Hess even wrote a book to help teachers work around those familiar constraints and assert more autonomy.
Now, the problem with conventional wisdom is often that it is not always right (teacher shortages are a case in point). But when it comes to teacher autonomy in public schools, new data back up the conventional wisdom. A report released last week by the National Center for Education Statistics (which I co-authored when working for a prior employer) looked at teacher reports of classroom autonomy in 2003-04, 2007-08, and 2011-12. From 2003 to 2012, there were statistically significant declines in teacher autonomy. The decline can’t be associated with any particular cause, but it’s important because it backs up a common narrative with data.
The report measures autonomy using six questions that ask about teachers’ control over everything from textbooks to student discipline, and teachers indicated less control on every measure over time. The Autonomy measure was broken out into three levels: “High” autonomy teachers indicated on average that they had “A great deal of control” across these six measures. On average, “Moderate” autonomy teachers indicated they had “Moderate” control, while “low” autonomy teachers indicated they had “Minor” or “No” control. Most of the overall decline was driven by increases in teachers reporting low autonomy, which increased by half—from 18 to 26 percent of teachers—between 2004 and 2012.
There were differences in teachers’ autonomy by individual and school characteristics. Black and Hispanic teachers reported particularly large decreases in autonomy. More elementary school teachers than high school teachers expressed lower autonomy (31 percent versus 19 percent in 2012), but the changes over time were about the same. The same pattern held for urban schools (31 percent in 2012) and higher poverty schools (33 percent in 2012), both of which had lower autonomy across all years, but saw similar decreases in autonomy compared to schools in other locales or serving fewer poor students.
What should one make of the nations’ teachers reporting lower autonomy? There are three important points to consider.
First, we know from these data that teacher autonomy is lower than it was a decade ago, but measuring autonomy is difficult because there is no standard to compare it against. If there is no “right” level of autonomy, it is hard to say whether these declines make small or large differences in the classroom. Teachers’ responses don’t suggest the sky is falling. In fact, the most common response to “How much actual control do you have IN YOUR CLASSROOM [sic] at this school over the following areas of your planning and teaching?” was “moderate” control, and many teachers still responded “a great deal of control” in 2011-12. So, while we know it is slipping, teachers’ classroom autonomy is still reasonably high.
Second, these are national declines in autonomy, and they reflect the attitudes that are implicit in many recent national education policies. National policies under the Bush and Obama administrations have made test based accountability ubiquitous and even pushed the high stakes of those tests down to the level of classroom teachers. (The Common Core might seem like an apt culprit here, but these changes were underway well before Common Core was implemented.) I won’t attribute these declines solely to these underlying national policy changes (especially without the supporting data), but it makes sense that national declines could be associated with national policy change.
Finally, these data bear out the conventional wisdom about teacher autonomy, and that deserves attention. Often arguments based on conventional wisdom are summarily dismissed, which is easy to do when there aren’t objective measures to back them up. I believe in data based decision making, but I also think there is a place for “Trust, but Verify” when it comes to conventional wisdom. Particularly when it comes to education, where many important issues are hard to measure, we often fall for the conceit that the measureable aspects of schools (read: tests) are the most important ones. The conventional wisdom keeps important non-measurable issues in view, and sometimes it happens to be right.
from AEI » Latest Content http://ift.tt/21NcP0n
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment