74. The role of the teacher’s union in the post-industrial school
[From Seth Godin, Stop Stealing Dreams http://www.squidoo.com/stop-stealing-dreams]
It’s not surprising that early on, many teachers found support in unions. The industrial nature of schooling set up an adversarial system. Management (the board, the administration, and yes, the parents) wanted more productivity, more measurability, and more compliance, not just from students, but from teachers as well. Spend less money, get more results—that’s the mantra of all industries in search of productivity.
In the post-industrial model, though, the lectures are handled by best-in-class videos delivered online. Anything that can be digitized, will be digitized, and isolated on the long tail and delivered with focus. What’s needed from the teacher is no longer high-throughput lectures or test scoring or classroom management. No, what’s needed is individual craftsmanship, emotional labor, and the ability to motivate.
In that world, the defend-all-teachers mindset doesn’t fly. When there is no demand for the mediocre lecture-reader, the erstwhile deliverer of the state’s class notes, then school looks completely different, doesn’t it?
Consider the suburban high school with two biology teachers. One teacher has an extraordinary reputation and there is always a waiting list for his class. The other teacher always has merely the leftovers, the ones who weren’t lucky enough to find their way into the great class.
When we free access to information from the classroom setting, the leverage of the great teacher goes way up. Now we can put the mediocre teacher to work as a classroom monitor, shuffler of paper, and traffic cop and give the great teacher the tools he needs to teach more students (at least until we’ve persuaded the lesser teacher to retire).
The role of the teacher in this new setting is to inspire, to intervene, and to raise up the motivated but stuck student. Instead of punishing great teachers with precise instructions on how to spend their day, we give them the freedom to actually teach. No longer on the hook to give repeat performances of three or four lectures a day, this star teacher can do the handwork that we need all star teachers to do—the real work of teaching.
When the union becomes a standards-raising guild of the very best teachers, it reaches a new level of influence. It can lead the discussion instead of slowing it down.
Tags: stopstealingdreams
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