New LA teaching reforms should act as model

Typically a laggard, an opportunity exists for Louisiana to become a policy leader with the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s adoption of the full slate of Let Teachers Teach reforms.

Last week, BESE unanimously gave the green light to much of the package of reforms, developed earlier this year by a panel mainly of educators and a few politicians and set to take place early next year. A part of its implementation depended upon legislative action, which occurred during this year’s session of the Louisiana Legislature.

In essence, the package removes bureaucratic hurdles that added little value to, or even detracted from, instructional success. Educators in public schools, echoing national surveys, have been vocal that certain policies and procedures – mainly dealing with student disruptive behavior, too rigid administrative requirements, and duplicative or inefficient activities – hampered their abilities to engage in actual teaching and effectively so.

Little opposition surfaced to these proposals, with them even receiving tepid acknowledgment from the state’s two major teacher unions. Yet the agenda hardly has received any attention outside of the state, in what appears to be a pioneering effort.

Of course, states differ in their classroom and school management policies, where some of the issues identified in the package may not exist in at least some other states. Still, the breadth of the package and the fact that it covers some areas that have generated much debate across the country, with teachers having to act as substitute mental health counselors for some students perhaps the most prominent (the reforms make it easier for teachers to dispense with that role and encourage appropriate intervention from individuals trained in that), surely there are parts to the agenda that every state could find useful to enable less distraction and more instruction from their teachers.

A few involved in education policy have been stumping for the agenda to affect a wider audience, with one researcher testifying before Congress that this was overdue as policy in all states. In it, he quoted Superintendent Cade Brumley, who organized the workshop that led to the recommendations now policy, in advocating for the recommendation for removal of habitually ungovernable students from classrooms: “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.”

In a publication, he put it this way: “It won’t do, for example, for teachers to have an attitude of ‘trust us and send more money.’ Their work is a public service performed on the taxpayer’s dime. Similarly, it does no good for policymakers to blithely assume bad student outcomes are evidence only of teacher incompetence or to expect teachers to solve every problem that children bring to school while serving increasingly as the social services provider of first and last resort…. Louisiana’s report is a good start at launching a badly overdue conversation about what we expect our teachers to be able to do, and how do we create the school and classroom conditions to enable them to do it well and sustainably.”

Hopefully, the rest of the nation catches on, whose policy-makers in many cases share pay concerns with Louisiana. While unions and some others continue to agitate over allegedly insufficient salaries for teachers (which may become a bigger issue with the salary supplements of the past two years on the chopping block for next year), implementing these things becomes a relatively low-cost tool to aid in teacher recruitment and retention. Naturally, the state should perform rigorous evaluation of these changes and adjust where necessary, but at their commencement Brumley, BESE, and lawmakers merit congratulations for the genesis and follow-through of what seems to be commonsensically effective policy.