The “pointy-tip of the spear” in public education is the classroom teacher. If a teacher is not well equipped she or he becomes no less vulnerable than the soldier who wasn’t issued body armor or provided with an up-armored HUMVEE.  Like soldiers, if teachers are not provided with the basic skills required for the environment they face, they will do what they know and probably fail.  Even more important, if the strategy is wrong, the best efforts of the few who break the rules in an effort to get the job done will be for naught. The disconnect between what the best in the field know to be true and what policy makers setting the agenda want to be true is almost always unambiguous warning of failure.

In the May 16 issue of Education Week, researchers Mike Schmoker and Richard Allington (member of the board of the International Reading Association) suggest as much. In the end what matters for student performance is good teaching. Uniform standards for what students should know and be able to do are one thing, but k-12 administrators' efforts to establish uniform agendas for what teachers should do and prescriptions for how they should do it, ignore the fact that the first order of business is making sure teachers can build skills they need to teach.

Both of us, like many others, have visited hundreds of classrooms with central-office or building administrators. These tours often are an epiphany for the administrators, as they are forced to have authentic encounters with the largely mediocre quality of teaching in their schools. They realize that all their plans, programs, and workshops don’t ensure effective teaching. Most teachers, regardless of these efforts, adapt their instruction to fit the local norms. If lots of worksheets and scant amounts of reading, writing, and discussion are the norm, then that is what instruction becomes.

In fact, the plans themselves are often the problem. Another national study looked at truly effective 4th grade teachers…. The researchers in this study concluded that the most effective teachers largely ignored their districts’ improvement plans, which still allowed (or even required) the use of the worst kinds of deadening, commercially developed programs, materials, and workbooks. Had they followed those plans, the teachers in this study would have been far less effective—and more like the other teachers in their schools.

The urgent question is this: Why do we create strategic plans that interfere with effective teaching, make no arrangements for teachers to work in teams to improve their lessons, and fail to ensure that instruction is at least occasionally monitored, so that we can celebrate progress and identify areas for further improvement?….

The research is clear. In their meta-analysis, the reading researchers John T. Guthrie and Nicole M. Humenick found tremendous benefits for students who learned in classrooms with lots of interesting books, who could choose much of their own reading material, and who spent lots of time reading and discussing books and articles in class (a rare thing, we find). These conditions produced effect sizes that were four times those the National Reading Panel reported for students who received systematic phonics lessons.

At the core, however, the problem remains one of incredibly limited visions of what good teaching looks like. We need to identify and disseminate effective instruction, and then let teams of teachers observe and refine good lessons and models of teaching, as they improve these on the basis of assessment results.

And educators cannot continue to give so little attention to monitoring the quality of the instruction. When we speak to superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals, we often ask, “How often do you visit classrooms? Do you, even once a month, systematically visit a handful to look for patterns of effectiveness or problems?” The answers are usually depressing. Very few leaders do this.

On the one hand, your editor knows of many school improvement providers whose programs were intentionally - and arguably necessarily, designed for relative quick results from a typically urban, inner-city teaching force with far less motivation, skill and capacity than the "most effective teachers" described above. On the other hand, rigid plans based on the presumption of incapacity are something of a self-fulfiling prophecy. The prospect of the assembly line doesn’t make teaching a very attractive profession. The best and brightest can find their creativity just as easily squelched in business or law while making a whole lot more money.  (Policy makers note: money is not everything to eveyone,  scope for professional discretion attracts people too.)

Sometimes the shortest line between two points is not a straight line. "Teaching to the test" seems like the best way to improve student performance, but kids learn more when they are fully engaged in something and realize they need literacy and math skills to pursue their interest. Developing "teacher-proof" plans seems like the answer to a less than stellar teaching force, but changing the profession is a matter of creating jobs offering accountability, autonomy and support.

The implications for the school improvement industry? Never assume teachers are robots or came from the bottom third of their graduating class in college. Allways treat them like clients rather pawns. Allways build choice into your offerings. Allways offer ways for teachers to develop their skills with each other. And allways think about ways your services can empower rather than constrain and are seen as assistance rather than an obstacle. None of these product/service development considerations are particularly expensive, and all will build customer loyalty because the actually add value.