Imagine you're a 6th grader in suburban Minnesota. You have a seat near the classroom window. One afternoon, you see a motorcycle pull up to your school, rev the engine, and wave in your direction. Your teacher grabs her things and exits. Your classmates rush to the window, just in time to watch your teacher jump on the back of the motorcycle. Gretchen Sage-Martinson always remembered her 6th grade teacher's dramatic exit from the teaching profession. Twenty years later in 2001, Sage-Martinson—by then a teacher herself—helped hire the first faculty for Avalon School in St. Paul, Minn., including me.
The Retention Problem and Reform Solution
Teachers do not always leave the profession with early-1980s rebel flair, but we do leave—and in staggering numbers. In a March 2015 interview on NPR, researcher Richard Ingersoll noted that teacher turnover costs exceed 2 billion dollars per year. Ingersoll also asserted, "One of the reasons teachers quit is that they feel they have no say in decisions that ultimately affect their teaching."
Some education reform policies make matters worse. Strict curriculum guides, excessive testing, and student behavior protocols block teachers from exercising professional autonomy and collaborating in ways that could most benefit students. No wonder so many leave.
But what if teachers could take the reins of reform at the school building level? It's happening right now at Avalon and other teacher-powered schools that offer teachers the collective authority to make decisions influencing their schools' success. More than 75 schools across the country (in rural, urban, and suburban systems and in both unionized district schools and public charters) have adopted the model. And new tools are helping even more educators design (or redesign) their own schools as places that are squarely focused on the needs of students.
Teacher-Powered Accountability
Avalon School serves more than 200 students in grades 6–12 who live in St. Paul, Minneapolis, and the surrounding suburbs. Our student retention rate is more than 90 percent, and our annual teacher retention rate is more than 95 percent. The teacher-powered "model" takes many different forms, with some schools having a principal but allocating certain school decisions to teachers. At Avalon, teachers control all aspects of running our school. Three teachers take on duties as program coordinators, which includes administrative work such as enrollment, testing coordination, and state reporting. Teachers lead as members of the Avalon school board, the finance committee, and the personnel committee. We serve as peer coaches, create marketing materials, write grants, and develop community partnerships. We do all of this—learning new professional skills along the way—while remaining connected to students.
In teacher-powered schools, regardless of the specific governing structure, each staff member must accept ownership, collaborate, solve problems, and hold one another accountable. Teachers control the curriculum, budget, professional development, and personnel decisions, and this means that full responsibility for meeting our academic and school goals is in our hands. All of us must accept ownership for the outcomes—but it is authentic ownership because we help write the goals, determine the academic plan required to achieve them, and adjust accordingly.
Like other public schools in our state, Avalon must meet intense external accountability measures, including 133 graduation standards and hundreds of benchmarks. Students take multiple standardized tests annually. But our most powerful accountability measures are those that we created with students, families, and staff beginning in 2001, including a 300-hour senior project presented to the community. The staff develop relationships with families that result in a 95 percent parent conference participation rate.
Every year, teachers are evaluated on our performance by our colleagues, our students (advisees), and their parents. This level of evaluation and accountability happens in a collaborative environment based on mutual respect for each other's work and was in place long before No Child Left Behind and state-mandated teacher evaluation systems.
The combination of autonomy, collaboration, and accountability is the secret to our retention rate. And a strong retention rate feeds itself, allowing us to implement a strategic plan and continuously improve our learning program, because we know the staff will be there to do the work. It's also cost effective because we are not constantly hiring and mentoring new staff. Avalon School has earned several finance awards from the Minnesota Department of Education and from our charter authorizer because so much of our money goes directly to the classroom.
Empowering Students by Personalizing Learning
Of course, the true appeal of Avalon for me is not the governance structure but what that structure does for students: it allows us, as their teachers, to make decisions that will personalize their learning and also give them the chance to lead.
The first six-week seminar I taught at Avalon was a government class,Freedom and Responsibility. Many of these young adolescents joined my next seminar, Writing the Avalon Constitution, in which they developed a powerful framework for student governance at Avalon while learning about the U.S. government. They defined ownership and accountability and outlined Avalon's three branches of government. They were a source of inspiration as we faced the challenges of putting our new teacher-powered model into action: we realized that if 14- and 15-year-olds could understand the powerful relationship between autonomy and accountability, then adults could, too.
We are a teacher-powered school, but I'd also describe us as student-powered. Students are trusted to learn valuable life lessons, including the idea that with power comes responsibility. They practice mediating conflict, solving problems, and creating new rules through our Avalon Congress. With support from their teachers, students also determine their curriculum and decide how they will meet their graduation standards, whether through seminars or independent projects.
Resources for Going Teacher-Powered
Through the new Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative, pioneers of the model are finding new ways to pass along what we've learned. This partnership between Education Evolving and the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) is connecting teachers across the country with potential mentors who have already been there, done that. A growing number of superintendents, principals, union officials, and policymakers are tapping into these resources, too.
Steps to Creating a Teacher-Powered School is an online do-it-yourself guide to starting a school (or reconfiguring an existing one). Crowdsourced from teacher-powered pioneers like my Avalon colleagues and me, the guide covers the big steps—and major decisions—involved in getting your school off the ground. Hundreds of hyperlinked resources let you identify questions to discuss with your cofounders, explore relevant research, and peek at sample governance documents.
An Inventory of Teacher-Powered Schools offers rich information about more than 75 schools like Avalon where the model is already at work. You can ask questions, share resources, and find mentors in a virtual community housed in the CTQ Collaboratory. And a monthly e-newsletter shares information about Twitter chats, conferences, and other events where you can learn more.
Teachers and the Public Are Ready for a New Approach
A recent survey conducted by Education Evolving found that more than half of American teachers are interested in working in a teacher-powered school. Meanwhile, the same survey revealed that 9 in 10 Americans agree that teachers should have more authority in school decision making. Public demand for teacher-powered schools is growing, and as the model spreads, more students and communities will experience the benefits that accrue when schools retain accomplished teachers.
Not all schools must adopt a teacher-powered model, but I would encourage every district to explore the model in at least one school. The sound of students engaged in deeper learning—debating, demonstrating, questioning—as their teachers engage in deeper leading is far more preferable to the squeal of a motorcycle's tires as yet another practitioner flees the profession.