Recent Teacher-related Publications

Minnesota teacher to Secretary Duncan: to improve teaching, put teachers in charge

Carrie Bakken, member of a teacher professional partnership (TPP) that runs Avalon High School in Saint Paul, Minnesota, met with Duncan to describe how the TPP arrangement improves school conditions for teachers and students. She argued that when teachers are put in charge, very different types of schools emerge, and today’s issues around tenure, compensation, and teacher evaluation are resolved.

Can Teachers Run Their Own Schools?

A case study of Avalon School and several other teacher-led schools in the Midwest. These schools use resources differently than traditional district schools, use a different praxis of teaching, and divide authority and responsibility differently—including assigning responsibility for learning to the students.

Evolution of Schools with Teacher Autonomy

This timeline traces the evolution of schools with teacher autonomy, since the 1980s. It documents the critical roles school districts, unions, and chartering laws have had since then, in developing teacher autonomy and greater professional roles for teachers.

TPP 21: Teacher Professional Partnerships for the 21st Century

TPP21 is a new venture to provide assistance to teachers, school districts, and states to help them understand, support, and implement teacher professional partnerships. Interested? Contact us at teacherpartnerships@educationevolving.org.

Teacher Cooperatives in Education Next

Twenty years ago, when the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed the notion of innovative schools operating outside conventional district bureaucracies, his aim was to put teachers at the helm. “If you want to hold teachers accountable,” he posited, “then teachers have to be able to run the school.” In the Spring 2009 Education Next, Beth Hawkins explores how some teachers are realizing his vision with the teacher professional partnership model championed by Education|Evolving.

Teachers as Leaders: Short on Power, Long on Responsibility

To upgrade teacher quality, schools need to go beyond just holding teachers more accountable. They need to give teachers more control.

How a School Looks When Managed by a Teacher Partnership

There's growing interest in improving the "management of human capital" in K-12: teacher recruitment, retention, compensation, accountability, etc. Usually this suggests 'better administration.' Yet, these decisions might be better made by teachers running a professional partnership. This interview with teacher Carrie Bakken addresses how a partnership handles running a public school.

Teachers in Professional Practice: An Inventory of New Opportunities for Teachers (Second Edition)

This 2006 inventory of existing and developing teacher professional partnerships (TPPs) documents growing interest in a professional model of teaching. The inventory describes several teacher professional partnership models, offering a useful overview of the many ways in which teacher partnerships are organizing and functioning.

Teacher Professional Partnerships: Books and Media Source List

This document lists several articles and book-chapters that have written up the teacher professional partnership/cooperative idea.

Freeing Teachers: The Promise of Teacher Professional Partnerships. (link)

In the April 2004 American Experiment Quarterly, Ted Kolderie wrote that virtually all of our discussion about improving teaching occurs within the traditional assumption that teachers are employees managed by administrators, rather than professionals in control of their work. Current efforts to train teachers, to improve teacher practice, to recruit teachers, to retain teachers and to change the way in which teachers are compensated need not take place within this boss/worker, master/servant framework.

Teacher Professional Partnerships: A Different Way to Help Teachers and Teaching

Teachers could and should have the option to work—as many other professionals do—with colleagues in a professional group which they collectively own, with administrators working for them. This is the original report on the topic. An inventory of schools with teacher autonomy is available here.

Democratic Learning and Leading: Creating Collaborative School Governance

In this book excerpt, Ronald J. Newell and Irving H. Buchen describe the collaborative culture and democratic-governance structure embodied in EdVisions Cooperative—a teacher professional partnership. They describe how the governance model works in practice, the critical success factors, and the perceptions of involved teachers.

Teacher Ownership and Teacher Unions

A teacher from Milwaukee describes for the Teacher Union Reform Network the arrangement in Milwaukee—a variation on Wisconsin's chartering law—that gives a partnership of professional teachers full authority and responsibility for the school while protecting both the teachers and the union on the economic front.

Teacher-ownership as entrepreneurship in public education. (pdf)

Ted Kolderie gave this paper, "Teacher-Ownership as Entrepreneurship in Public Education," to a symposium at UCLA. In it, he states that teachers could own their work; could manage, or arrange for the management of, a department of a high school, a discrete school, a program district-wide. The text appears in a special issue of the International Journal of Entrepreneurship Education (IJEE) Volume 2. To purchase this edited volume visit the Senate Hall website at www.senatehall.com. Once on the Senate Hall Web site, click "entrepreneurship" on the navigation bar.

National Meeting on Teacher Ownership: Concept and Implications

Visitors look at a chartered school in Minnesota that has no employees, as well as no courses and no classes. Notes of the discussion at a national meeting at Hamline University in September 2001.

Professionals and Administrators: Two Models of Organization

Notes from an evening with a group of teachers, and the partners in a law firm and a medical clinic. The discussion about the relationship of professionals and administrators, in law and medicine, compared to the relationship of teachers and principal in a typical school, is fascinating especially with regards to authority and pay.

The Case for Decentralized Management

Notes from a workshop on school-based management. Ron Hubbs, former chairman and CEO of a major insurance company, tries to explain to superintendents why it really is better to let people closer to the working-level make most of the decisions. There's an astonishing response from one superintendent present.

Professional Control of Practice: Physicians and Teachers

The medical director of a big multi-specialty hospital/medical group—in which the doctors are employees—describes how the professional and ‘business’ decisions are divided between physicians and managers. Ted Kolderie’s notes from a conversation with Dr. George Isham.

Albert Shanker: Reflections on Forty Years in the Profession

In this 1991 retrospective, Albert Shanker looks back over 40 years in the profession. He is realistic about the union's conventional strategy of higher salaries and smaller class size. He looks toward others strategies: differentiated staffing, the individualization of learning through technology, project-based learning, and performance-based assessment.

Leased vs. Owned Departments (And Some Implications for Schools)

Teachers, principals, superintendents, union leaders listen to an executive describe how a department store is a combination of ‘owned’ and ‘leased’ departments. Ted Kolderie shares his notes from the discussion. “We could organize a high school like this!”