How Much Autonomy Should Teachers Have in Their Classrooms?

In this Education Gadfly article, Robert Pondiscio reports on the National Center for Education Statistic’s School and Staffing Survey (SASS). The researchers looked at teachers’ sense of professional control in their classrooms, which is “positively associated with teachers’ job satisfaction and teacher retention.” Teachers who say they have less autonomy are “more likely to leave their positions, either by moving from one school to another or leaving the professional altogether.” Teachers were asked their degree of control in these areas:

• Selecting textbooks and other classroom materials;
• Content, topics, and skills to be taught;
• Teaching techniques;
• Evaluating and grading students;
• Disciplining students;
• Determining the amount of homework to be assigned.

Comparing results from the 2003-04, 2007-08, and 2011-12 school years, the study found a slight decline in all six areas, with the number of teachers saying they had a “great deal” of autonomy declining from 82 percent in 2003-04 to about three quarters in the most recent year – still pretty high. Teachers reported significantly more autonomy in the last four areas than in the first two.

Pondiscio recalls that as a first-year teacher in a South Bronx elementary school, he had a great deal of control over the content he taught and the materials he used. He spent countless hours planning lessons and writing curriculum – “hours that would have been far better spent practicing and mastering my craft,” he says. “Sure, I had plenty of ‘autonomy,’ but I lacked the time to exercise it… Since creating curriculum and lessons from scratch each week took prodigious amounts of valuable time, however, my ‘autonomy’ yielded more frustration and dissatisfaction.”

Compared to other public-sector workers – police officers, fire fighters, civil servants – Pondiscio believes teachers have a great deal of control over their immediate environment. “The question,” he says, “is where to strike the balance of accountability and autonomy so as to maximize teacher satisfaction and student outcomes even while fostering innovation.” The SASS report doesn’t adequately address that issue, he concludes. 

“Teacher Autonomy in the  Classroom” by Robert Pondiscio in The Education Gadfly, December 9, 2015 (Vol. 15, #48), http://edexcellence.net/articles/teacher-autonomy-in-the-classroom; the full study, “Public School Teacher Autonomy in the Classroom Across School Years 2003-04, 2007-08, and 2011-12” by Dinah Sparks and Nat Malkus, U.S. Department of Education, is at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2015/2015089.pdf. 

From the Marshall Memo #616