Next fall many New York City public school teachers may find their "literacy coach"... compelling them to teach reading and writing exclusively by the methods of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project....

I got a glimpse of how the project goes about training these coaches when I attended a free, open-to-the-public workshop last month called, "The Project's Latest and Best Thinking for Literacy Coaches (and Others who Provide Professional Development for Teachers)."...

While trying to grasp all the involved steps that a coach has to implement, an audience member asked a question that seemed to be on everyone's lips: "How do you keep your methods from feeling offensive to teachers?"

The instructor replied by admitting that often teachers did tend to feel offended, and that it was a "perennial problem." But she quickly went on to say, "It's important for principals to tell their teachers that they have to comply; to say, ‘This is the culture of our school now; this is what we do.'" She went on to add a somewhat ominous comment, "a lot of teachers get weeded out," suggesting that those who don't conform are forced out. Although in what way this enforced expulsion occurs was left disturbingly vague....
Barbara Feinberg, The New York Sun, April 27.

New York is hardly the only major school district to adopt uniform stategies for curriculum and instruction - Pittsburgh comes to mind, and there are many others.

Whether offered by for-profit or non-profit school improvement providers - there's no one best way of teaching, and no one best provider of professional development.

The idea that teachers are more like infantry soldiers or assembly line workers than health care professionals or athletics coaches, suggests that students are more like a faceless enemy or inanimate objects than unique people. 

Surely there are methods of teaching that are proven not to work.  Beatings, bribery and magic spells come to mind, but the notion that any professional should be allowed to use only a limited tool set has got to be a loser.

Your editor will admit that the teaching colleges are not on average attracting their fair share of the nation's top students, and many teachers need a teaching system, but treating teachers as anything less than professionals who we expect to exercise discretion and hold accountable for results doesn't seem like a great strategy for public school improvement or for attracting the people who are now choosing professions that prize discetrion like medicine and law. Career choices do not revolve entirely around financial compensation, and the youthful urge to make a difference is not likely to be satisfied by the image of becoming a cog in some great wheel.

Indeed, it is hard to think of a worse way to manage - or a better way to demoralize - a group of professionals. And it's just plain bad management for results. Requiring teachers to use a single teaching system essentially shifts responsibility for student performance from teachers to those with the one best way.  Management not only assumes responsibility for the program's efficacy, but for getting every teacher to use it.  Even if the former were true, the latter is simply impossible - and every competent manager of professionals knows it's impossible.

Why we would not simply hold teachers accountable for their value-added to student performance and provide them with the resources they believe they need to do their job as professionals is hard to understand.

Diktat is not school reform, not is it likely to yield school improvement.