Teacher Autonomy: Solution or problem?

It is well known that within the hierarchy of any Education System, the schools are in the bottom of the line and the teachers are the most subordinate employees in the entire structure, yet they are the most important players to support the whole business.

Teacher Autonomy is a concept that seems to be out of date in collectivist cultures where there’s a long power distance between subordinates and superiors. My guess is that this is something intentional. People who make the important decisions maybe don’t want teachers to be autonomous but rather just obedient, right?

I'll explain this by taking as an Example two different countries where I've worked.

What is Teacher Autonomy?

It is the extend to which a teacher can make important decisions on his own to benefit the students and enjoy his teaching. For example, during the 90s in my country (Venezuela), teachers had a fair amount of autonomy, they could make decisions on what to teach, how to teach a topic, when to teach it, what books to use, how to assess the students’ progress, how to correct their behavior and so on. Even when I first became a teacher in 2010, I could still do all those things. I only had a list of competencies that the students had to mater before moving to the next level and based on that I would plan all my lessons and teaching materials, including the books to use for each of my groups, I could even decide on my own schedule and the coordinators would arrange everything.

Now the new education policies within the current socialist government have left the teachers with little power till the point that in public schools if a student is not ready to be promoted to the next year based on his performance, the teachers will have to promote them anyways.

In Venezuela, this is a new problem but the high score in indulgence of its people generally make them release their impulses and desires with regard to enjoying life and having fun, so practically they still see everything with a positive attitude although they realize that there is a problem.

This issue will hopefully be conjunctural. Once the current government is replaced, the education policies and practices will be fixed to be more efficient as they used to be before for both teachers and students.

Dark Side of Teacher Autonomy

In this context where the teachers were really autonomous to manage their classes as they wanted, they had also total control over the students’ performance and everyone would rely on their professionalism and qualifications to guide the academic path of the students. Collectivist teachers would embrace individualistic practices of teaching which were congruent with their own cultural beliefs and formation. However, not all the teachers were ethically prepared to have so much power and unfortunately some of them were immoral and corrupt.                                                                                                                                                This was the reality about the Teachers’ Autonomy in some middle schools, high schools and even Universities. Being underpaid made that some teachers were easy to manipulate and they would change their minds about a student’s performance before writing the report cards if they had received generous gifts from the student. Some others were even worse and they would trade passing or better grades for money or sexual favors.

Consequences of lack of Teacher Autonomy

My experience in Turkey, where I’ve been teaching for the last 3 years, has shown me that the lack of Teacher Autonomy brings different problems not just to the teachers but in the long term to the society.

I believe that teaching is an art and the creativity only comes to those who are free. When the teacher autonomy is degraded to only the way the teachers teach an existing curriculum with an imposed material, teaching becomes something trivial and mechanical. When the teachers are not allowed to follow their instincts and experiment new things in the classrooms, their creativity is killed. As a consequence, I can list the following problems:

•  A lot of teaching but no learning
• Incompatibility of programs with specific groups
• More classroom management problems
• High teacher turnovers
• Recruitment of less qualified teachers (easier to be manipulated)
• Lack of academic excellence and reliability
• Standardization of the evaluation and assessment system

In this context, the private schools become only diploma machines because all the students will be granted one on time as long as they pay the tuition fees. It wouldn’t actually matter if they are ready to face life outside the schools, they will be promoted year after year no matter what anyways and the public schools are indoctrination centers where the students learn to be patriotic and defenders of the convenient history of their country.

Finding the right level of Autonomy

So far, it seems that Teachers’ Autonomy can represent ether a problem or a solution for collectivist education systems. In the case of Venezuela, although the academic results were outstanding, it brought problems of corruption and scandals to the classrooms while in Turkey a bit of freedom to their teachers in the decision-making process could restore the reliability of the education system and its students.

What we can do is to analyze what aspects of autonomy might be more strongly rooted in each collectivist culture, design policies to empower the teachers based on the results and implement them with a flexible supervision to support the learning environment and detect actions of corruption.

Basically, the plan is to look for the honesty point in which both teachers’ autonomy and formal policies are even, or is there more that we can do to stop everyone usurping the teachers' authority?