Last week, I was honored to be invited to testify in front of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) on issues of teacher salaries, school funding, and staff shortages. The committee chairman, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, introduced a bill last year that would set an annual base salary of $60,000 for public school teachers. In my remarks, I said no one will reasonably begrudge paying teachers more. But if the goal is to keep good people in the classroom and raise outcomes for students, higher pay is unlikely to get the job done. Teachers are just as likely to cite student behavior, job-related stress, and feeling overwhelmed by the demands of the job as their reasons for leaving. The simple fact is we’ve made teaching an impossible job for the majority of the nation’s four million full-time teachers to do well and sustainably. A RAND survey of teachers released on the eve of the HELP committee meeting largely echoed all this.
In my testimony, I quoted Cade Brumley, Louisiana’s State Superintendent of Education, who said in a recent interview with the Independent Women’s Forum, “Students who are habitually ungovernable should be removed from teachers’ classrooms so teachers can actually teach and students can actually learn.” It was refreshing to hear a state superintendent say such a thing when teachers are more likely to be asked what they did to trigger the disruption, or told dismissively that students don’t act out when lessons are relevant and engaging.
Brumley’s remark wasn’t merely a casual observation. Last month, he and the state’s Department of Education issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report hasn’t received nearly enough attention, and apparently none at all outside of Louisiana. It deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction and effectiveness and raising student achievement. In retrospect, I should have attached a copy of it to my Senate testimony.
Running just three brisk pages, it features eighteen bullet points aimed at fixing professional development, changing approaches to student behavior and discipline, improving curriculum and instruction, and taking non-academic responsibilities off teachers’ plates. This includes abolishing antiquated lesson planning requirements, limiting cellphone use in schools, and either paying teachers for non-academic work or putting an end to it altogether. “Teachers are asked to be mental health professionals, social workers, and nurses on top of their instructional duties,” Brumley told me this week. “It’s too much. It’s not fair to teachers or the students.”
Brumley began the project earlier this year by pulling together a work group comprised of two dozen teachers, led by Louisiana’s Teacher of the Year, Kylie Altier. “This is not a check-the-box exercise,” he told them; he promised to take on the issues they raised and push their recommendations with the state board of education, the legislature, school board presidents, and district superintendents. Last month Brumley stood alongside Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry at a press conference touting the report and its recommendations. “There is not a job more fulfilling or better in the world, all because of children,” Altier said at the event. “However, the reality is that many teachers don’t feel they have the time, capacity, or autonomy to do this important work in a sustainable way.” Hear, hear.
Five of the report’s eighteen recommendations concern student behavior and discipline, including decoupling student behavior from school accountability systems. Currently, suspension rates can negatively impact a school’s performance metrics, discouraging administrators from removing disruptive students from the classroom. “Teachers are telling me they have habitually disruptive students, and some administrators are leaving these students to disrupt classroom,” said Brumley. That feedback was critical to recent passage of a state law to expel such students from the classroom after three suspensions. “Not expelled to go home,” Brumley explains, “But expelled to alternative sites where they can get the support that they need—academically, behaviorally, socially, mentally—to eventually return to the general school setting and function among their peers.”
Rather than putting the responsibility on teachers, the report says students should have access to trained mental health professionals. And parents’ rights advocates will be cheered by the recommendation that “families should approve and be fully engaged if students are recommended for professional support.” Still another recommendation is limiting cellphone use in schools. Devices should be off and stored away during instructional time.
If there was any doubt about how well the report’s recommendations would play with front-line educators, it was erased when Brumley presented them to 7,000 teachers at the state’s annual teacher summit in New Orleans a few weeks ago. “After sharing the first recommendation, I struggled getting to the next recommendation due to teacher applause,” he said. It took several minutes to get through the list.
Brumley is vowing to continue to press the teachers’ recommendations. “I am over disruptions in the classroom preventing teachers from teaching and children from learning. I’m over excessive bureaucracies, trainings, and paperwork on our teachers. I’m over the art of teaching being taken away from our high-quality, professional educators,” he told me. “It’s time to take back this profession, allowing teachers to be successful, while keeping an eye on the purpose—stronger academic outcomes for students.”
I’ve long argued that if we’re serious about improving student outcomes at scale, then education reform needs to evolve from its technocratic fixation with pulling policy levers to a movement focused on improving instructional practice and getting better results from the workforce we have. Louisiana’s “Let Teachers Teach” is a good place to start.
