Autonomy

By Court Skinner

Each child is unique and deserves the best education possible to assure that he or she can take advantage of all the opportunities available to create a productive life.

As each child is unique, so is each collection of children that form classrooms in a school. By the same argument each school is unique. Those best suited to handle classrooms and schools should be the teachers and principals that have been given responsibility for them. If they are the right people then they must be given the autonomy to do their jobs and to make the decisions required to maintain a productive learning environment.

Sadly our education system has developed from the principle established for a factory where the mission is to create a large number of identical units of production. In such a case it is straightforward, if not simple, to provide a test that assures this similarity. Our students are unique and that means the metric for achievement must include some judgement as well as the numerical performance of a test. Their teacher should be qualified to practice this and to determine, subject to community, county, and state constraint the achievment level of each child in his or her classroom.

This, however, is the least of the problems. The real challenge for teachers is to make learning exciting, to create the environment that convinces each child that learning is something that can be enjoyed for a lifetime. This means that some of the unnecessary constraints in the classroom must be lifted to allow room to learn and even more importantly to learn to learn. Many of the people voting in this election missed that opportunity, but getting children excited about learning is the real job of the teacher. Doing it for a group of children who are none the same as another is the challenge. How to do this leads to my next piece of philosophy, the PPP or Purpose, Principles and Practices approach to managing an organization.