Public Education Reform: Teacher Autonomy, Testing, and School Choice

Introduction to Public Education Reform

Education reformers have proposed a number of strategies to help increase teacher effectiveness and overall student performance in public schools. Proposals include, among other things, reducing the level of teacher autonomy, using testing and standards to evaluate performance, and introducing charter schools as a way of encouraging public schools to improve their performance. This paper examines the arguments put forth by proponents and critics in each of these three areas.

School reform is the name given to the various efforts geared at changing public education in the United States to focus on outputs — that is, student achievement — as opposed to inputs. School reformers acknowledge public education as the primary source of K-12 education for the country's younger generation. As such, they aim to transform public education so that it operates more like a market: an input-output system in which accountability creates high stakes for performance standards. Considerable debate still surrounds this issue, particularly with regard to teacher autonomy, the use of tests and standards, and school choice. The sections below review the conflicting arguments put forth by both sides of the debate on each of these three issues.

Teacher Autonomy in Public Schools

The concept of teacher autonomy refers to the independence of teachers in the school setting, particularly regarding their choices about what to teach particular groups of students and how to teach it. Conflicting groups differ on whether teachers should be allowed to make such decisions autonomously, drawing on their professional judgment. Critics of such autonomy argue that the low graduation rates found in public schools, and the wide achievement gap between students in public schools and their counterparts in private institutions, indicate a need to improve teacher effectiveness through the enactment of penalties for underperformance, the provision of pre-packaged curriculum materials, the establishment of demanding evaluation systems, and increased administrative oversight.

Membership-based professional organizations for teachers and teachers' unions, however, argue that such actions would undermine the professional status of teachers, as well as their ability to use their expertise to make informed decisions about their students' education. Moreover, such restrictions would stifle innovation and creativity among teachers, which would eventually result in high job dissatisfaction, lower student performance, and high attrition rates within the teaching profession. Providing teachers with a standardized script to follow when teaching undermines the recognition that teachers are skilled professionals, possessing the requisite training to make decisions that maximize their students' academic outcomes.

There is a genuine need to reform public education and to increase the effectiveness of teachers in public schools; however, infringing on teachers' autonomy in the classroom is not the right approach. Paulo Freire (2000) points out that without freedom, people are unable to exist authentically or to be fully themselves. Similarly, teachers who are denied the autonomy they need to make their own decisions in the classroom are unlikely to give their full effort toward their students' learning outcomes. Better outcomes, Freire (2010) posits, would be realized through the reflective participation of teachers in the process of developing measures for improved efficiency. Schools should take the initiative to engage their teachers in developing strategies that would help increase overall effectiveness without impeding on teacher autonomy. Teachers can be compared to the "oppressed group" in Freire's analysis — they are likely to be more committed when they feel like a genuine part of the reform process, rather than when reforms are simply imposed upon them.

Testing and Standards

Education reformers argue that tests and standards could help increase the efficiency of teachers in public schools. They contend that standardized tests would increase accountability on the part of teachers because scores would become part of the public record, enabling states to compare the performance of different schools on a common scale (Goldstein, 2014). In this way, underperforming teachers would be identified and placed under more intense scrutiny.

Critics of standardized testing, however, argue that such a move would drive teachers to "teach to the test," ultimately hindering students' long-term performance (Ravitch, 2013). Such tests would reduce creativity on the part of teachers, who would be under pressure to prepare students for these exams and would therefore neglect crucial skills that go beyond what the test measures (Ravitch, 2013). Moreover, standardized tests evaluate a student's performance on a single day without taking into account the circumstances under which the student sits the exam. For instance, a student who has an argument with a parent on the morning of the test is likely to be less focused, and any underperformance in that case cannot reasonably be attributed to the teacher's ineffectiveness.

The critics' perspective is more persuasive, for the simple reason that the overriding goal of current reforms is to improve the learning outcomes of children in public schools — yet standardized tests and rigid standards can undermine those outcomes in the long term. While tests can serve as one useful measure of teacher effectiveness, a more productive approach would be to evaluate growth in both teacher and student performance over the course of a full year, rather than on the basis of a single test. Evaluating performance based on one exam does a disservice both to the teacher and to the student who worked hard throughout the year but failed to score at a proficient level due to external factors such as test anxiety or unforeseen personal problems.

Conclusion

Both sides of the debate have raised significant arguments in relation to the proposed reforms in the education sector. In order for maximum benefits to be realized, however, the conflicting parties will need to work together collaboratively to develop strategies that genuinely maximize students' academic outcomes.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Goldstein, D. (2014). The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession. New York, NY: Knopf Publishing.

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools. New York, NY: Knopf Publishing.