School & District Management

School Without Administrators

By Anthony Rebora — July 20, 2010 1 min read
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Carl Anderson, guest blogging on Dangerously Irrelevant, writes on the promise of “teacher professional partnerships”—an antidote, he suggests, to the outmoded top-down organizational structures prevalent in schools. He explains:

TPPs are similar to law firms where the practitioners own their own practice. In TPP schools there is no administration but instead the teachers in the TPP work together to share the responsibilities normally delegated to building an district administrators.

Anderson believes that, in addition to flattening a school’s organizational chart, the TPP arrangement has built-in school-improvement levers:

First, it brings more decision making responsibility closer to those who are directly effected by those decisions. It places agency closer to those served by schooling and in so doing elevates the teaching profession. With agency comes responsibility and built-in accountability. If a teacher is held responsible for their own performance via a personal stake in ensuring that they offer a quality learning environment that students will want to participate in there will be no need for complex systems of teacher performance pay or other measures like those in RTTT.

Anderson says there are currently ten TPP schools in the U.S. (who knew?) and that “they all appear to be doing well.” More on TPPs here.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Teaching Now blog.