Gene Maeroff
The Empowerment of Teachers
Low Morale Pg. 1
Liz Woods, a veteran English teacher in Philadelphia, thought that the need for raising the morale and status of big city schoolteachers was profound. “There is no way I can say it strongly enough,” Woods remarked. “In the typical school you are isolated, cut off from everyone. The rest of the culture outside the school doesn’t give a damn about you or about the kids you are trying to teach. The school system itself almost regards you in that way. You are in the place where the bells are ringing, but the people who are calling the signals for the schools are in places where they can’t even hear the bells.”
Teachers Key to Change
Despite the centrality of the teacher’s role in determining what happens in schools, many of the reports on school reform, beginning with A Nation at Risk (1983), emphasized altering the outward structure – a longer school day, a longer school year, more of this subject, more of that subject. Such changes hold promise and can be important, but in the end it is the teacher who is going to make the most difference. If elementary and secondary education in America improves, it will be, more than anything else, because of the part teachers play. Nonetheless, the teacher’s role is often ignored in the recommendations for improving schools. (future links)
The Meaning of Empowerment Pg. 6
Empowerment, as viewed in this book, is a term somewhat synonymous with professionalization. It does not necessarily mean being in charge, though that is possible; more than anything else it means working in an environment in which a teacher acts as a professional and is treated as a professional. The inevitable result is empowerment. Toward that end, there are three guiding principles that appear and reappear in these pages.
- Boosting status is fundamental to the process because, simply put, those who have lost the will are not likely to find the way. Teachers themselves make it abundantly clear that the ability to look at themselves and their colleagues through new eyes has liberated them from the self-imposed shackles of low esteem.
- Making teachers more knowledgeable is an obvious step in enhancing their power. Francis Bacon said it long ago, and it has never been said better: “Knowledge is power.” Part of the reason why teachers have not exerted more authority is because they are not sufficiently well informed to do so. A teacher not versed in history must assuredly depend on other to supply a curriculum for a history course. A teacher intimidated by mathematics is not likely to be able to critique a textbook. Teachers shaky in their academic and pedagogical backgrounds must repeatedly defer to the judgments of supervisors, who are given the time to be the supposed experts.
- Finally, allowing teachers access to the lofty towers of power means building psychological ladders they may climb to escape their isolation and gin the overview that few of them usually attain. It also means connecting teachers with each other and with principals, building a kind of collegiality that has been all too unusual in elementary and secondary schools.
“Traditionally, power in public education flows down from school board to superintendent to principal. The teacher’s only power is at the bargaining table and in the classroom – but only over the children and under the rules imposed from above” (Hechinger, 1986)
Working Conditions of the Teacher Pg. 20
It is fashionable to ascribe the current low status of teachers to the social upheaval of the last generation, but a glimpse of how teacher have been treated through the generations shows that they have always occupied the role of underlings: “Self-denial was the sine qua non of a school teacher’s life. It was a prudish existence not far removed from that of the men of an earlier era who arrived penniless in the New World as indentured servants, obligated to teach children of the landed gentry in exchange for their eventual freedom. Josiah Royce, the philosopher, wrote in 1883 that a teacher mind find ‘that his non-attendance in church, or the fact that he drinks beer with his lunch, or rides a bicycle is considered of more moment than his powers to instruct.’ One can almost visualize those risqué teachers, taking clandestine spins on their satanic bicycles. It was not until more than half-way through the twentieth century that teachers began to shake free of the rigid codes of conduct imposed on them by school boards and administrators. One teacher, Minnich Revonna, remembered that when she started teaching in a small Oklahoma town in the mid-1950’s she was told where to live, not to use tobacco or alcohol, not to get involved in politics, and to attend church regularly. Add the bicycle restriction and it might as well have been the teacher whom Royce was describing three-quarters of a century earlier” (Maeroff, 1982, pp. 160-61).
. . . . in New York City until just a few years ago, the people who repaired the window shades were paid more than the new teachers. New York is also the place where overcrowding at Public School 47 in the Bronx made it necessary for a teacher of English as a second language to hold her classes in one of the bathrooms because no other space was made available to her.
Pg. 21
Between 10 and 50 percent of a teacher’s time is spent on noninstructional duties – recording test scores, monitoring the halls and the playgrounds, running copying machines (Carnegie Forum, 1986, p. 15). “They are constantly running out of supplies, forced to use outdated texts and make do with inadequate materials,” the report of the Carnegie Forum Task Force said. “Skilled support help is rarely available, nor the time to do the job right” (p.15). Can you imagine engineers being asked to do their jobs without calculators, or accountants being told that they have used up their quota of ledgers for the month? “In sum, according to Ernest L. Boyer, “the teacher’s world is often frustrating, frequently demeaning and sometimes dangerous” (1983). It is hardly a desirable job description.
Knowledge is Critical and yet . . . Pg. 36
Being a schoolteacher is having so much to do and so little time to do it that keeping up with the growth in knowledge is a luxury. Even the most dedicated teacher finds that trying to stay abreast of subject matter is like paddling upstream on a fast-moving river. For the typical high school teacher, meeting with 125 to 175 students a day, marking as many of the papers at night, and preparing for the next day’s classes – not to mention maintaining a family life and possibly part-time job – it is a task without beginning or end.
“Bells are always ringing and you’re running back and forth,” said Shahdia Khan, an English teacher at Ingraham High School in Seattle. “You get a half-hour for lunch and there’s no time to interact professionally with your colleagues. There is just some bitching about the administrators and everyone talking about how frustrated they are. When school is over you’re so tired you don’t want to talk to anyone.”
Access to Power Pg. 76
The levers of power, the switches that are turned on and off to make a school system run, are seldom in the hands of teachers. Sometimes it seems that even the building custodian has more authority than the teachers. If teachers are to have greater influence over what occurs in schools, a way must be found to get their hands on the switches that provide access to power. What they need along with status and knowledge, is access to power.
Principal-Teacher Relationships Pg. 87
Unfortunately, the history of principal-teacher relationships is so paternal and hierarchical that principals most frequently end up in dominating roles. There has been an unfortunate tendency by some principals to treat teachers as though they occupied a niche only slightly above that of the students they teach. Some principals certainly have the manner and self-assurance to be more equal partners and put teachers at ease, but others might find it difficult to do so. And the spirit that is created among teachers in an empowerment program might be undermined by the participation of principals.
Networks Give Teachers Access to Power Pg. 89
Thus, teachers have much more chance of gaining success to the mechanisms of power if they can operate as part of a network – a network of like-minded teachers within a school and within a school system and even with colleagues in other districts. It is no revelation that there is strength in numbers, and, clearly, having a team of teachers involved in trying to produce changes at a school is a more powerful prod than using individual teachers. New knowledge and fresh applications have their best chance of taking hold in a climate in which several teacher are similarly enthusiastic and bond together.
On Power Pg. 100
One change in structure that could hasten the advent of more shared governance in schools would be the decentralization of decision making from central headquarters to the school building level. Without safe-guards this shift could set up each principal as a little czar, but properly handled it could lead to teachers and principals feeling a bigger stake in their schools and, in turn, committing themselves to make the needed changes. Decentralization decision making could be an important step towards greater empowerment of teachers. School-based management is a concept that is mentioned more than it is implemented. It is a bottom-up approach that has the appeal of giving more decision making power not only to teachers and parents, but to principals as well (Marburger, 1985). (future links to related studies and basic principals of good pedagogy i.e. sharing of power)
Decentralization of decision making would be of equal value to teachers in elementary schools and secondary schools. . . . Assuredly there are differences in their circumstances. . . . . The relationship of the teacher and the principal also tends to be different in an elementary school than in a secondary school, where the teachers are not as likely to be infantilized by the principal.
Lack of Trust Pg. 105
As the school reform movement has rolled merrily along, the political atmosphere that helped foster it has led to increased demands for evidence that improvements are indeed occurring. While the goal seems worthy, it too easily lends itself to the kind of simplification that can curtail ingenuity by teachers and force the juices out of teaching. This is anything but empowerment. Frank Smith (1986), in his book Insult to Intelligence, complained of programmed instruction that trivializes the curriculum and coerces teachers to take a prescribed approach. He said that where such practices existed, there was what amounted to lack of trust of teachers.
What then should happen if empowerment is to have a deep and lasting effect? It is certain that administrators, school board members, and parents must trust teachers to do their job competently if the reins are to be loosened enough for teachers to have the flexibility that will make them more powerful. Trust of teachers is undoubtedly an underlying issue that is not addressed openly. People do not willingly bestow power upon those in whom they do not have confidence. But certainly if society’s most precious possession – its children – are entrusted to teachers, there are grounds for trusting those teachers to have more to say about how schools are run.