Teachers Should Own Our Schools

The flawed incentive structures of our educational systems. And… a radical proposal for how to rethink the economics of teaching.

The unit of education is the teacher.

The unit of education is not the school.

It is not the building or the campus.

And it is not the department.

It is not the grade level, the course, or the classroom.

You cannot really break up the educational experience into class periods, days, planned curricular units, or semesters.

Nor can you truly segment learning into syllabuses, textbooks, or lessons.

None of these constitutes the primary discrete unit of education.

The only real unit of education is the teacher.

But most educators, students, and the general public have forgotten what education really is or what it is supposed to be.

Learning happens through the teacher. The minimal isolable unit of education is the student’s experiences with a single teacher. What is more, the primary variable that determines the quality of a student’s education is who the teacher is.

Thus, there is no goal for improving education beyond this:

Maximize the connections the best teachers make with students.

(Get more students better connections to the best teachers.)

Now there are basically two ways to do that:

Increase the number of excellent teachers. Improve the ways that the best teachers reach students.

If we take the idea seriously that the teacher is the unit of education, then that is how we should measure the quality of educational systems.

Let’s face it, though. This is not what schools today are designed to do. Our schools have not been operating with the teacher as the primary unit of education.

This is not to say that teachers have not been highly valued assets within all levels of our educational system. However, the system for evaluating these assets and incentivizing their improvement is broken.

Note that educational economist Gary Becker defined the fundamental premise of economics as the idea that people respond to incentives. Our economics of education has some very deep flaws. We are incentivizing the appearance of educational improvement instead of actual educational improvement.

And the reason we are not incentivizing educational improvement is this:

Teachers have been treated essentially as a hired property managed by the school.

It should have been the opposite.

Teachers should own the schools.

When teachers are treated as properties managed by schools, as mere employees, incentives do not improve the teachers. Instead, the incentive structures follow a “Do more with less.” philosophy. In this case, that entails improving the appearance of educational quality without paying more for better teachers.

In terms of a lot of other aspects of the business of education, “Do more with less.” is not a bad philosophy to apply. Making the most of class periods, building structures, funds for school supplies, the prior abilities of the students, etc. are a good thing to try to do.

But it is never a good idea, in fact, to try to do more with lesser teachers.

A “Do more with less” philosophy focused on cutting costs while keeping up quality may work in other industries. But it doesn’t work in education. Mainly because the product of education is so hard to measure. And I will say more about this later.

{Read my piece on the basics of an integrated science and history curriculum here.}

Still, that is what schools who own teachers (via employment contracts) will always try to do. They will always try to add to the appearance of teacher quality before they will actually try to get more students better connections to the best teachers.

Why?

First, it is incredibly difficult to:

Increase the number of excellent teachers. Improve the ways that the best teachers reach students.

Those are far more difficult goals to achieve than to add to the apparent value of teachers as they are in the eyes of your consumer base (parents, students, their networks, potential donors, municipal officials, the educational press, and the general public).

Public relations, marketing, and shifting the metrics away from the structurally intransigent human capital of the teachers themselves (hard to improve) is cheaper than product development.

In short, most schools and school systems probably have little capacity to increase the value of their basic most basic assets: the teachers themselves either through effective and expensive professional development or by rehiring and replacing lesser teachers with better teachers.

And for those well-endowed schools and companies that have the resources to actually

1. Increase the number of excellent teachers.

2. Improve the ways that the best teachers reach students.

There is little to no reason for schools that already doing “great” to actually contribute to this public good.

For the best schools, to increase the number and reach of excellent teachers generally means decreasing the relative value of their own assets. Increasing the supply of quality teachers actually decreases the demand/value of the excellent teachers — or, who, at least seem to be excellent — that you hold under contract.

So remember that educational economist Gary Becker defined the fundamental premise of economics as the idea that people respond to incentives. When schools own teachers we are not incentivizing educational improvement not merely incentivizing the appearance of educational improvement.

How can we envision what it would mean for teachers to own the schools?

It really requires thinking differently about the structure of education. Radically differently.

Most educational reform initiatives that are familiar to us leave the most dangerous faulty assumptions about the structure of the school in place.

In order to incentivize improvements in student access to the best teachers, teachers need to own the education that they give.

What would that mean though?

We are so far away from that right now in terms of what a school appears to us to be, that the question seems a bit off the wall.

How do we get teachers to own the education that they give?

Teachers need to own, sell, and profit from what it is they produce. They need to own and profit from the value with which they imbue the product of their educational work.

Well, what is the product?

There are, of course, a lot of “educational products.” Books, school buildings, desks, computers, software. And teachers often do play a role in the production of these. Many teachers — and educational experts or administrators who once worked as teachers — have profited from their production. But these educational products are tools in the educational product.

The product of education is, in a sense, embodied in the students themselves. The real educational product is the value added to the student over the course of the teaching process.

Here is why the economics of education is so difficult. It may be that there simply is no way to assess the true product of education: the increase in human capital due to a specific teacher. Not that there has been a shortage of attempts to do so. Tests of all kinds and statistical studies of lifelong future earnings have been applied to students produced by different educational circumstances. Still, attributing tested improvements or lifelong learning improvements and rewarding the teacher accordingly seems like a ridiculous enterprise to attempt.

No wonder schools have gotten away without doing it. Instead, schools have gotten away with conforming to an array of traditional images of what it means to reward student and teacher performance. But as they have done so, they have drifted even farther from the essential task of an educational system: To get more students better connections to the best teachers. To increase the impact of the best teachers.

Economists have long discussed the idea that most products come together without any single person knowing how to make them. The classic example was the pencil. Many distinct levels of expertise and autonomous productive capacities are aggregated in the ultimate product. No one can evaluate every step.

No one person — no one company or government agency — knows how to make a pencil from end to end. If this is true of a pencil, how much truer is it of an educated human being?

Yet, the point is that the cream will tend to rise. In a fair market, the best pencil at the best price will be the one that sells.

Does this happen for humans as well? What the metaphor shows us is this. No one administrator or administrative panel can sit above the process of a student’s education select the best materials all along the line. Each stage in the supply chain needs to do its own quality management when it selects the resources from the previous step. There are price and evaluation measure that apply at each step.

Unfortunately, though, we’ve been distracted from the real nature of the flow of human capital from teacher to teacher.

We have not been able to understand education in these terms of an appropriately mobile pricing and evaluation of the human capital involved. Knowledge is not acquired by students on a grade by grade basis. The process is orders of magnitude more dynamic than that.

It’s because schools have been working with the wrong units: Schools, grades, departments, courses, semesters. When we assume that these are the real units of the processes of educational production, we tend to overlook the centrality of the teacher. We overlook that the phases and stages through which students move is always ultimately defined by the unit of the teacher.

Why? Don’t all of these structures just facilitate the movement of students from one teacher to another?

My point is that they do not. They supply the appearance of progress but they actually prevent teachers from doing diligent analysis and pricing of the human capital that they are taking in all along the line. The school takes on the process of moving students from one grade level to the next and the department does much of the work of deciding what courses are prerequisites for later courses.

What is more, the steps cannot be fixed. They need to shift and move. Different pieces of the product may or may not be added or acquired at different places and times in response to resource availability and other factors.

All along the way, however, they prevent teachers from receiving appropriate rewards by the next stage in the production process for the quality of the product that they have produced. Once a teacher is slotted in, unless they are failing quite badly, they get no great reward. Massive incompetence is punished. But true successes of teachers are poorly rewarded only long after the fact.

“But, we still have the best teachers being rewarded by being placed in the best schools, don’t we? At least, those incentives are working. Aren’t they?”

No.

Capable teachers are often rewarded with positions that allow them to teach the best students, at the best schools, with the highest salaries, and to often publish their ideas (about teaching or other topics) in the publications with the highest impact and widest readership (especially at the university level).

But this whole way in which schools — from elementary school to graduate education — have implemented an economy of teacher-promotion has confused the adding of value to the teaching process with adding value to the teacher’s reward.

Better students don’t just reward the teacher. A class of better students also makes the teacher’s real effectiveness harder to gauge.

Better students make for better educational results on the whole. Students who enter at a higher level exit at a higher level. If you are only measuring the output, then whoever gets hired to teach at the schools that attract the best students, will automatically appear to be the best teacher.

Yes, one of the rewards of teaching should be a stronger connection with the strongest students. This requires a recognition of the fact that the presence and aid of better students improves the teaching of lesser students. Access to better students as the material is a reward in and of itself. It enhances the teacher’s process. And better students not a sufficient reward. Higher salary and better working conditions are accrued along with the best students.

The problem truly lies in the way we have isolated grade level tracking and student promotion from teacher promotion. It has to do with the way we have misconstrued the fundamental units of education as temporal, spatial, and curricular units instead of at the level of individual humans.

And when teachers own schools, negotiating exchange of students from teacher-phase to teacher-phase will become a more robust and flexible practice.

This needs to happen in order for incentives to actually operate to improve teachers. And this is going to require that teachers are allowed and encouraged to acquire student-collaborators from all different age groups.

Naturally, we shouldn’t imagine that we just reward the best teachers with the students who know the most. Then, of course, we would have all the best teachers with the oldest students. Now, in a way, that idea is tacitly institutionalized in the divides between K-12, higher education, and graduate education. Still, no one wants to admit that this divide entails the superiority of college professors over grade school teachers. Instead, these are viewed as “different jobs.” It is actually quite difficult for someone nominally qualified to teach at the college level to get a job at the grade school level without significant retraining.

But respecting the developmental arch of students across childhood and into young adulthood hardly means that a teacher cannot or should not work at different grade levels. In fact, some of the most respected models for alternative education depend on the very idea of collaborating across grade levels.

This argument for teacher ownership of education leads to a second point:

The line between teacher and student needs to be viewed as a spectrum and not a hard and fast line.

This already goes on in a functional way at the graduate education level. Being a graduate student means being a teacher or teaching assistant. As far as the rewards of being a good professor, the tenure track divide remains more vigorously stratified than ever. But in terms of teaching function, the hierarchy of collaboration is a spectrum (if only it were rewarded with pay, benefits, and job security as such!)

Already, many high schools have taken to nominating students as “Teaching Assistants” in upper level classes. The ridiculous thing about it is that these positions are, for the most part, treated as encouragements to good behaviors and resume boosters. In fact, they should be paid. And why could you not have paid teaching assistants from higher grades in elementary classrooms, for instance? At the moment, we would likely view this as some violation of the quality control mechanisms that glorify teachers as professionals and experts. But we already know that these quality control mechanisms have not actually been working.

If teachers own schools, they should be able to remunerate “students who help” as co-teachers because it will raise the overall quality of learning. Again, this already happens at the graduate level of higher education. And there is no reason why mixed age classrooms can not operate in just such a flexible way. When the idea becomes normalized, new forms of opportunity will no doubt open up for the hybrid learner-teachers who currently suffer under the tenure-track research university paradigm.

A university without walls will not immediately elevate everyone to the professor’s level of expertise. But neither will it destroy the concept of expertise altogether. Instead, opening up the opportunity to be a researcher to a wide range of individuals by removing the barrier constituted by the human capital choke point of college admissions will allow more diverse opportunities for talented teachers and researchers to demonstrate and disseminate their expertise and receive the feedback, rewards, and collaborative opportunities that they deserve.

True, this is going to mean that school communities are going to take on some more diverse arrangements in terms of interacting levels of knowledge and expertise. Teachers will operate to exchange and promote students through a chain of instruction environments (formerly grades or classrooms) that will not follow a linear stepwise path. These will be networked communities that will be permitted to share and overlap.

And who will oversee all of this? The teachers themselves with the help of parents and with the collaborative idea-sharing across a number of levels of student-teachers.

The limits of a school community should no longer be constrained by buildings. We need students meeting students, and students helping students across the world. There is no reason for internationalism to be the designated province of higher education exclusively. The internet has provided unprecedented opportunities for cross classroom exchange through media production and distribution. Every classroom should be producing text, video and social media for a network of critics and collaborators (For other classrooms around the world). There is no reason for the teacher alone to be responsible for reaching out to other learning communities. The students themselves can be involved in critiquing the work of other learning groups.

We should question whether any student is too young to discover their next learning community, their next great teacher, their next core of co-students. Students have long been allowed to form their own collaborative groups within a single classroom. Why have we been so resistant to opening up student explorations of education extending outside of the confines of the school and classroom?

Because we have not understood:

The teacher is the unit of education.

Educators have let themselves decline into viewing the student as a mere consumer of the school product instead of as the bearer of the product which society as a whole is going to benefit from.

Teachers should demand profit from what they produce. Teachers should own the schools.

Which brings us to the inevitable problem that confronts any radical revision of an industry that is viewed as a public good:

Who Pays?

Who would be willing to fund such a shift in agenda?

Imagining that the Teacher Ownership model of school institution does not immediately indicate a single monolithic source of funding is not an obstacle. At present, the complex and incredibly institutions specific knot of private tuition, public subsidy, state-protected debt, non-profit endowment, and for-profit investment that power our educational industry at all levels yields as wide an institution-specific array as one could possibly imagine.

When a teacher wants to fund a program, a teacher should be able to take advantage of structures as diverse and multifaceted as we have allowed the old style schools to access.

If one looks only at the past, it may seem like teachers would be resistant to such a shift. More work? That was the great convenience of the tenured positions of the old model. Someone else takes care of all that. The teacher just collects their paycheck.

But it is this very fiscal complacency of the teachers themselves with regard to their schools which has rotted out education from the inside — especially higher education. And what is more, this very image of the Professorial expert couched in their Ivory Tower has in fact protected the incumbents of education from challenges by younger entrants to the educational marketplace who might not only have different economic models for education but who also might be more capable teachers.

Sadly, the grand wave of privatization and common national standards in education has done nothing to change all this. In fact, rigid thinking about curricular units that give no account to the individuality of the teacher has gotten worse. The old hierarchies remain in place in structures which are ever more extractive, ever more determined to “Teach on the Cheap” and to game the metrics and make a quick buck. But private and charter schools certainly are taking a big bite out of the pretensions to Public Good that our most revered schools monopolized for so long.

Ultimately, the question we have to face is this: Do we send students to school to learn or as a process of being indemnified by the help of administrative babysitters? Is it the teachers who matter here, or the structure of assumptions and insurances that promise to, “keep our kids safe.” The fact is that we would do better to unbundle the many services schools now provide from the essential school functions of teaching and learning.

Still, I think the “privatization” wave so far has only been a shadowy harbinger of the next big disruption to come: When teachers take up ownership of education and of the schools — not only to rid themselves of bureaucratic bloat and the glass ceilings of the tenure system as it functions in both K-12 and higher ed. The reason to embrace the next big disruption — the reason to engage the possibilities of inventing an Uber or Airbnb of education or something even better — is to become the most flexible, innovative, knowledgeable, motivated, and profitable teacher that one can be — and to reward those individuals — both teachers and students — who take that challenge seriously.

Read more about the deprivileging of the teacher by educational institutions here.

Also, read about why I post on medium here.

And you can check out my other posts on different topics.

This one is an outline of the 12 major events of history since the “Big Bang.”

On the ancient origins of modern economic thought.

On a new way of explaining the Gender Wage Gap.

On the failures of new media to inform like old newspapers used to do.