With complete control of their schools’ budgets and no laws about class size or extracurricular programming, principals can opt to have two classes of 15 second-graders each or to have one class of 30 and hire an art teacher, for example. They decide how to evaluate their teachers. They even pick when the school day starts and ends for each grade. Teachers across the Netherlands say that while they have certain topics they’re required to cover, they feel free to teach how they want. The idea of a scripted curriculum with pre-prepared lessons, used by thousands in the U.S., is alien. Bunt for his part does require his teachers to make lesson plans to ensure they’re thinking ahead, but he never checks them. "I don’t know what they’re doing right now," he said. "I don’t have to know."

In a 2008 report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said that 94 percent of decisions for middle schools in the Netherlands are made by individual school administrators and teachers, while 6 percent are made at the federal level. In a 2011 OECD analysis, Dutch schools reported the second-highest amount of autonomy in the world in picking tests and teaching materials. The U.S. was ranked 21st out of 32 countries. The same report found that, broadly, the more control that a country’s schools have over these decisions, the better the country does on international assessments. Indeed, the Netherlands is among the top quarter of countries in reading, math, and science, according to the Program for International Student Assessment. The country significantly outperforms the U.S., whose scores fall in the middle.

Both countries would like to move up in the international rankings. Unlike many places in the U.S., though, in the Netherlands teacher autonomy is a crucial part of the education-reform discussion. "We are so entrenched in this culture of top-down authority right now," said Kim Farris-Berg, an American education consultant and lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success: What Happens When Teachers Call the Shots. The Dutch, she added, "somehow see that path forward" to greater teacher control of schools.

Many Dutch teachers still feel as though they don’t have the authority to make important decisions about their schools, like picking what to teach. In many cases, however, Dutch teachers face fewer constraints than their American peers. For example, although educators in the Netherlands also express concern about pressure to "teach to the test," and although Dutch students also must pass standardized tests in many subjects to graduate from high school, the Dutch students are required to take only three standardized tests in primary school: one at the beginning, one in the middle and one at the end. Some principals elect to have students take more, but the choice is theirs. Most American students take standardized tests in multiple subjects each year in third through eighth grade.