Building Community

Why Schools Need to Work for Adults as Well as Kids

When I began observing and writing about school reform in the ‘00s, there was a frequent refrain among reformers: “Are you in it for the kids or the adults?” The idea was that educators were not serving the needs of kids, unions were obstacles to reform, and that reformers should steamroll recalcitrant educators for the benefit of students.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see this is a deeply flawed theory. It assumes a zero-sum game between what is good for students and what is good for their teachers. But, in practice, good schools, good organizations, and even strong educational nations have realized that the reality is almost exactly the opposite: for any kind of organization to thrive in the long run, it has to work for its employees as well as its clients.

This is a timely moment to revisit this theory about school reform because of the increasingly dire state of the teaching profession in the United States. In a comprehensive review of many different data sources, a paper by Brown University’s Matthew Kraft shows that on a variety of different metrics—job satisfaction, percentage of college graduates who want to teach, public perception of teaching—the teaching profession is at a 50 year low. Since 1969, the Gallup Poll has been asking whether parents would like it if their child became a teacher; in 2018, for the first time, the majority of parents indicated they would not want their child to teach.

Meanwhile, research by my former colleague (and Kraft’s graduate school advisor) Susan Moore Johnson has consistently found that the most important factor in keeping teachers in the profession is the quality of their professional working environment. Not that surprisingly, when teachers feel supported by their administration and their colleagues, they are more likely to stay than colleagues working in less supportive environments. Teaching can be lonely work and to sustain it requires support from other adults. Especially for early career teachers who are trying to figure out the basics of how to get through the day, other teachers are critical sources of wisdom and practical expertise, and, according to Johnson’s research, are the difference between teachers staying and going.

To be a bit provocative, in the United States, teaching is in a downward spiral. Teaching is seen as a highly feminized semi-profession that is not widely respected. Teacher preparation is short and disconnected from practice. Our nation’s notoriously weak welfare state means that many students come to school with high levels of poverty and trauma. Teachers in the U.S. spend most of their time in front of students and have little time to prepare or collaborate: the average American high school teacher is in front of students for nearly 1,100 hours a year, compared to less than 600 in Japan or South Korea. These longstanding features of the U.S. teaching profession were compounded by a testing and accountability movement that imposed unwanted standardization onto teaching, and, more recently, by political efforts to ban books and restrict teachers from discussing race or support transgender students in schools. Capable people look at this whole situation and think, why would I want to do that? And the result is that fewer and fewer people become teachers, which in turn leads to more emergency credentials and lower standards for teacher preparation programs, and the whole cycle begins anew.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In places as varied as Japan, Canada, and Singapore, teaching is a highly selective profession that is difficult to join. Teaching is more popular, teacher preparation is more serious, alternative routes to teaching are limited, and students are supported through a stronger welfare system. Teachers have more time to prepare and collaborate and spend comparatively less time in front of students. For all of these reasons, performance is higher and teachers are more widely respected. I was talking about these features in a classroom one time when a Canadian student stopped me and said, “The thing you have to understand is that in Canada, teaching is a really good job.” One way to look at our challenge is to ask: How can we shift from our current downward spiral to an upward one?

Let’s go back to the question of our theory of reform. It is not the case that the only choices are keeping the status quo or imposing an agenda of testing, standards, and accountability. There is a third path, which I think of as the “Canadian” approach to school reform, after Toronto scholar Michael Fullan, who I see as the most influential advocate of this view. This perspective starts from the assumption that the most critical asset in any school system are its teachers, and that sustainable reform that results in improved learning for students requires engaging those teachers in ways that help them learn and grow. System-wide actors can help to usher in this world by creating the space and time for teachers to collaborate; creating opportunities for schools to connect with other schools, researchers, and others possessing needed practical knowledge; and build political will for new ways of doing education. If we treat teachers and schools as partners in change, they are much more likely to embrace rather than resist efforts at reform.

I want to close with a scene from an EL Education school I visited recently on the West Side of Chicago, one of the poorest zip codes in the country. The students are almost exclusively students of color. The theme of the school, originating from EL Education, is “we are crew not passengers,” meaning that students are active collaborators rather than passive recipients of learning. And they value connection and community, embodied in a 30-minute block each morning where small “crews” of kids connect with a trusted adult to check-in, play games, and gradually get to know each other more deeply. Part of the reason for the emphasis on “crew” is that the school is in the middle of gang territory, and the school’s adults want their crews to be more attractive options for the students than the communities they might otherwise find on the streets. Academically, they use learning expeditions (EL Education’s word for project-based learning) to give students extensive field experiences where they are positioned as active investigators, not passive recipients of knowledge. The school has won a number of awards and has been featured in books like Paul Tough’s Helping Children Succeed and David Yeager’s Ten to Twenty-Five.

What’s their secret? I would argue that it is symmetry—that they seek to build the same kind of culture among adults that they are trying to foster among students. On the day we were there, a wintry overcast Chicago day 10 days before winter break, at the very end of the day, we found the schools’ 30 or so teachers sprawled on a hallway floor in a circle having a staff meeting. But rather than the usual droning of the principal to bored staff members, the staff was sharing appreciations: “Thank you, Sparkle, for supporting my last minute hare-brained idea,” said one teacher to another. “Big shoutout to the 5/6 team for making such a beautiful data wall.” “Thank you for coming out to support the 5/6 girls basketball team—Latesha was really struggling with her confidence but the kids are such dawgs on the court,” the teacher/coach said to affirmative murmurs from the group. “I appreciate you for coming and killing a bug in my room.” “Thank you to everyone who is staying late to transform the building into a Winterfest Wonderland.” Around and around it went. By the end, almost everyone had spoken, and almost everyone had received an appreciation. If you want to be in it for kids, this is the kind of world we need to build for adults.

Photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages, CC BY-NC 4.0.