Freedom for Teachers

Letter to the Editor of The New York Times

The increased “autonomy, flexibility, and freedom to innovate” that the Carnegie Corporation’s Vartan Gregorian wants for teachers surely will not be found in the nationalized system of teacher certification that he advocates. (“How to Train — and Retain — Teachers,” op-ed, July 6.) That would open the door to more government control of teaching, not less. It would make intellectually bankrupt schools of education even more dominant in the lives of public-school teachers.

Liberation means trusting the results of freedom. Let public-school principals do as the private schools and hire knowledgeable people without regard to their credit-hours in pedagogy. Assign the new teachers savvy mentors. Use value-added assessment to ascertain how much they are helping each child learn. Good teachers would benefit from a free market that measured their value in performance rather than pedigree. Respect for the profession would soar.

——————————————————————————–

Robert Holland is a senior fellow at the Lexington Institute.