This essay is adapted from a collection titled Unlocking the Future: Next Steps for K–12 Education, that was published by Opportunity America and funded by the Walton Family Foundation.
When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was visiting U.S. troops headed to Iraq in 2004, a soldier asked why his unit had to scrounge scrap metal in trash heaps to weld onto old Humvees to strengthen them against attacks. Rumsfeld memorably responded, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” Many thought he was being dismissive, to which he later responded in his memoir, “My response told a simple truth about warfare: As a conflict evolves, both sides adapt to the reality of the battlefield.”
Teaching isn’t combat, though education is often discussed using martial metaphors. Teachers are often said to be on the front lines or in the trenches. But there’s a lesson in Rumsfeld’s “simple truth” that can and should be applied to education: You go to school with the teachers you have, not the teachers you might wish you had. Education policymakers and administrators, however, have long been stubbornly reluctant to adapt their battle plans to the simple truths of classroom life, student readiness, and the changing labor market.
Decades of education policy have evinced unshakable faith that the way to raise student outcomes is to improve teacher quality, whether through training and certification, unlocking excellence through incentives, or by luring away the cognitive elite from more remunerative careers through some combination of higher pay or enhanced prestige. None of these strategies has been fruitful at scale, nor are they likely to be effective in the future. The inconvenient fact is that the nation needs nearly 4 million people to teach its children. Any number that large means the men and women who staff our schools and teach our children will be, by definition, ordinary people. There will never be a sufficient number of classroom saints and superstars to go around, nor enough hours in the day to meet the ever-spiraling demands we place on teachers to fulfill multiple roles, from instructional designer and deliverer to unlicensed therapist attempting to reach and teach the “whole child.”
In sum, there is a conceptual problem at the heart of our decades-long effort to improve teacher performance. We are seeking to raise and enhance the capacities of millions of teachers while, at the same time, placing ever greater burdens on them. We have known for several decades that some teachers are more effective than others. But identifying what makes them so has proven elusive. No consistent or clear relationship has been found, for example, between teacher credentialing or certification exams and classroom effectiveness. If achievable, sustainable progress is our aim, we should endeavor instead to make the job one that can be done with a reasonable degree of fidelity and success by the teachers we have, not the teachers we wish we had.
One concrete improvement to teacher effectiveness would be to reduce the burden placed on them by lesson planning, which tends to be incoherent, below standards, and incredibly time consuming, taking time away from potentially higher-yielding uses of their time and energy. Time spent creating lessons from scratch or culling them from disparate websites is time not spent analyzing student work, offering feedback, building subject matter expertise, cultivating strong relationships with parents, and other higher yield activities. While many educators argue, often strenuously, that their autonomy is sacrosanct, and for allowing teachers to build a curriculum around their students’ interests or customize their lessons to maximize their engagement, an even stronger argument can be made that the mere existence of an established curriculum allows the teacher to build expertise herself, leading to richer conversation and thoughtful questions, with deeper student thinking as a direct result.
In his 2016 book Leadership for Teacher Learning, Dylan Wiliam observes that when teachers are asked to identify something that they will stop doing or do less of to create time and space for them to explore improvements to their teaching, they fail miserably. “They go through the list of their current tasks and duties and conclude that there is nothing they can stop doing or do less of because everything that they are doing contributes to student learning,” he writes. “In my experience, it is hardly ever the case that teachers are doing things that are unproductive. This is why leadership in education is so challenging. The essence of effective leadership is stopping people from doing good things to give them time to do even better things.”
Wiliam’s insight deserves careful reflection among education leaders and policymakers alike. It is beyond the scope of this brief article to describe all the ways in which we have made teachers’ jobs unmanageable for “the army we have.” What is needed is a new approach to a persistent problem: Let’s not ask what more teachers can do. Ask instead what are the things that only a teacher can do. Everything else should be a job for someone else.
