The 74 Million – Matt Barnum
“‘No man is an island.’ “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In some ways these truisms don’t seem to apply to the prevailing notion of schools. Policymakers from President Obama on down have focused on the individual teacher as the locus for improvement. “[The] single most important factor in the classroom is the quality of the person standing at the front of the classroom,” President Obama has said, echoing many researchers and policymakers. The administration has pushed states to rigorously evaluate individual teachers and tie those evaluations to pay, tenure, promotion, and dismissal decisions. But is a teacher’s classroom her own island? What about her colleagues, her administrator, her school’s culture, and the professional training she receives? Some scholars and advocates have begun to wonder whether we’ve loaded too many policy eggs into the “individual teacher” basket without sufficient examination of a teacher’s context — the principal, colleagues, resources, support structures, and collaborative environment, among other things, that shape instructional practice.”(more)