Teachers deserve a shot at running their schools | EdSource Today

Teachers deserve a shot at running their schools | EdSource Today:

Teachers deserve a shot at running their schools

August 27th, 2013 | 1 Comment | 
By Charles Taylor Kerchner / commentary

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Ted Kolderie, the Minnesotan who had a large hand in drafting the nation’s first charter school law, is selling ideas again. This time he’s promoting teacher-run schools, or at least greatly enhanced teacher capacity to design their own jobs. As he has said, “in a real sense all the effort to create better people for the job is working uphill if you aren’t, at the same time, creating a better job for the people.

Kolderie and his invaluable colleague, Joe Graba, former teacher, union leader, Minnesota legislator and education dean at Hamline University, hosted a little meeting recently to scope out the prospects for making the teacher-run-school idea more popular. Kim Farris-Berg, the lead author of Trusting Teachers with School Success, counts about 70 schools where teachers control the curriculum and operations.

Farris-Berg found six schools in California where they say teachers call the shots, and there may be many more. Existing teacher-run schools operate under varying governance arrangements. TheChrysalis School in Palo Cerdo, east of Redding, is a charter. The San Francisco Community School operates under special arrangement with San Francisco Unified School District. The High Tech High schools, where teachers have substantial instructional autonomy but lack governance authority, work under a statewide charter issued by the California Board of Education. The Civitas School of Leadership is part of Los Angeles Unified School District and operates under the school autonomy rules accorded the Belmont Zone of Choice.

The larger teacher autonomy story in Los Angeles concerns the 48 Pilot Schools, which are 

Exercise in, junk food out at nation’s schools, CDC study finds - by Jane Meredith Adams

Increasing numbers of school districts nationwide have adopted policies to prohibit junk food sales, ban tobacco use during school events and require physical education classes in elementary grade levels, according to a major new study released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The 2012 School Health Policies and Practices Study is the largest and most comprehensive survey.

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