There鈥檚 a familiar, frustrating tension between practice and policy. When it comes to grading, devices, equity, choice, student behavior, and much else, there are yawning gaps between the views from inside and outside the schoolhouse. Worse, educators and policy types often wind up talking past one another. I think we can do better. To delve into this disconnect, I reached out to Alex Baron, the director of academic strategy at a District of Columbia charter school, an Oxford Ph.D., and a former early-childhood and high school math teacher. Together, we鈥檒l try to bridge a bit of the practice-policy chasm.
鈥搁颈肠办
Rick: Let鈥檚 talk school choice. You鈥檝e always been a strong supporter of public school choice. But today, I want to talk about the edgier cases: school vouchers and education savings accounts (ESAs). Should educators embrace these kinds of private school choice programs?
Our friends at the and the think the answer is an emphatic 鈥淣O!鈥� But Congress is considering a big federal scholarship tax credit, states keep adding programs, and these programs are an increasingly prominent part of the K-12 landscape.
I think this is a good thing for parents. Perhaps more surprising, I also think that expanding private school choice is a potentially terrific thing for educators.
Why?
Let鈥檚 start with this: The norm today is that teachers work for their local school district鈥�whatever its policies, practices, expectations, and indignities. Talk about a 1920s notion of a company town! That鈥檚 a problem. Don鈥檛 like the district鈥檚 instructional culture or disciplinary practices? You鈥檝e got limited options. You can commute to another district, escape to one of the handful of nondistrict alternatives, or hope administrators don鈥檛 hassle you when your door is closed.
This works differently in other professions. In architecture, law, health care, engineering, journalism, and such, employees are freer to pursue work with many more employers. That means that hiring is more of a matchmaking process and that professionals have more of an opportunity to weigh the appeal of competing work cultures, job descriptions, and organizational policies. Look, I don鈥檛 want to romanticize things. Everyone works in places where they sometimes disagree with practices or policies. But in schooling, we鈥檝e turned this unavoidable 鈥渟ometimes鈥� into an expectation鈥攅ven a feature. Indeed, a decade ago, in The Cage-Busting Teacher, I talked at length about how this sense of trapped resignation can be pervasive even among recognized and accomplished educators.
Just as it鈥檚 good for families to be free to find schools that best serve their kids, it鈥檚 good when educators can find institutions where they can do their best work. Expanding the palette of choices does that. And, while charter schools can help, they鈥檝e proved to be limited in their ability to foster a robust array of learning environments, schedules, instructional models, and staffing arrangements. New publicly funded education options, like vouchers and ESAs, have a lot of potential to expand the array of promising possibilities.
Private choice is facilitating the emergence of hybrid schools, microschools, and models of career and technical education that would be a bear for a district to incorporate. It can loosen the grip of school board politics in ways that allow school leaders to raise expectations for student behavior, parental engagement, or faculty performance. This holds the promise of offering educators new career paths, more welcoming environments, and new leverage when frustrated by their current working conditions.
Alex: Fantastic points, Rick. Educators would benefit from more employment options. I鈥檒l add some practitioner color before revisiting your voucher and ESA idea.
Fundamentally, educating is a creative act, but teaching is among the most constraining jobs around. Teaching can feel like Groundhog Day: Educators have an identical schedule day after week after month, and school days turn into a school daze. Plus, many districts expect teachers to use scripted curricula with fidelity. While such curricula raise the instructional floor, they can also lower the ceiling for strong educators who want to teach content their way. Finally, teachers are beholden to thorny district policies around discipline, phones, political speech, etc. In short, teaching is awesome, but being a teacher often sucks.
Overall, Rick, you cogently argue that current employment options stultify educators, but I鈥檇 extend the argument: Inflexible work arrangements also create an artificially narrow teacher pool. It takes a very specific type of professional who can handle a stiff daily schedule, an ossified step-and-lane pay structure, and a retirement model that incentivizes geographic immobility over a 25-year career. Thus, our current instructional corps is more dispositionally homogeneous than the true potential teaching pool. So many incredible adults would love to teach but avoid it due to the profession鈥檚 inflexible mold. Thus, with more employment options, benefits would accrue not only to current educators but also result in a supply of teachers who better reflect student variability. When more kids can identify with their teachers, we see increased , , and other desirable outcomes.
So I鈥檓 with you on the problem. And it鈥檚 even worse post-COVID, since public schools鈥� rigidity is anathema to the professional flexibility many people now seek. But I鈥檓 less clear and more wary of the voucher-ESA solution you discussed. I鈥檇 love to see our public system change rather than transitioning to a more privatized model, which would further undercut public school investment.
And to me, it seems that the tax-credit scenario could eventually blur the lines between the public and private systems in ways that promote less flexibility than we now imagine. Why? Well, public money comes with public accountability. Right now, charters often fail to sustain innovative practices because they have to perform on public accountability metrics, which over time leads charters to adopt similar traditional practices from which they initially sought to deviate. If we pass a tax credit, wouldn鈥檛 citizens also demand accountability from expanded vouchers and ESAs? And might that accountability have a homogenizing impact in private settings similar to the impact seen in charters? A tax credit may actually threaten the heterogeneity it aims to create, thus diminishing the potential degree of educator flexibility you described.
Rick: You raise some crucial points. I鈥檒l respond to a couple big ones and then I want to talk a bit more about an odd tension鈥攖he way the education profession鈥檚 ardent commitment of public management has stifled the professional opportunities of educators.
First, it鈥檇 be great if traditional systems were able to reimagine the profession. The problem is that these systems, governed by elected officials and squeezed by competing constituencies, tend to be stymied by policies and contracts. Indeed, the changes that both 鈥渞eformers鈥� and unions have championed have tended to add new layers of administrivia鈥攊ncluding new teacher-evaluation systems, mandatory DEI training, limits on classroom discipline, and the like.
Second, you鈥檙e right that ESAs and vouchers are likely to be accompanied by a desire for more public oversight. That鈥檚 certainly reasonable, when public funds are at stake, as is the expectation that these providers be transparent about their finances and outcomes. And, as with charter schools, performance-based accountability may be in the cards. But none of this is necessarily as constraining as the kinds of operational mandates that suffuse district schools when it comes to seat time, curricula, compensation, scheduling, certification, and the like.
Third, it鈥檚 unhelpful to romanticize either 鈥減ublic鈥� or 鈥減rivate鈥� schooling. That said, a big challenge for traditional school districts is that their longevity means they鈥檙e burdened by decades of accumulated rules and regulations, contracts and cultures. I鈥檇 love to see that changed. But it鈥檚 incredibly difficult to unwind these things once they鈥檙e enmeshed in an organization鈥檚 DNA. That鈥檚 why I鈥檝e always talked about the possibilities of 鈥済reenfield education,鈥� which gives educators and communities the chance to stand up new schools.
But I want to take just a moment to talk concretely about what it might mean to move away from a one-size-fits-all professional model. In professions like health care or engineering, it鈥檚 common to encounter professionals who work part time because it鈥檚 what makes sense given their current life situation. Such an option is almost nonexistent for educators. Certification, staffing practices, and teacher-of-record requirements mean that teachers are typically either full time or out of luck. This is especially self-destructive for a profession that鈥檚 seeking to recruit and retain young parents.
In most professions, there are organizations that reflect a variety of cultures, schedules, and calendars. This creates room for those with different circumstances to find a suitable fit. In traditional school districts, there鈥檚 far less room for any of that. State laws, district policies, and collective bargaining agreements tend to ensure that traditional school districts put students and teachers on a schedule that would be familiar to a factory worker in 1925. This can be a poor fit for working professionals in 2025.
We鈥檝e seen a proliferation of new educational staffing models, like New Classrooms, Opportunity Culture, or the Next Education Workforce. While a big part of the promise of these models is that they make it possible to rethink professional responsibilities and turbocharge the compensation of impactful educators, the reality is that existing contracts and policies sharply limit how these models play out today. I鈥檇 love to see schools have a freer hand to start courting polished educators and accomplished mentors with $250,000 offers, the same way we see professionals courted in law or higher education.
Anyway, that鈥檚 my two cents from where I sit on the policy side of the house. What say you, my friend?
Alex: I鈥檒l close with my three cents (thanks, inflation) on why educators get stuck in a public-management mindset.
As your greenfield thinking suggests, people get stuck in what they know; to shift mindset, people have to see another way. For example, a teacher may think his students are incapable. As an instructional coach, I always make the same move: Bring the original teacher to a stronger teacher鈥檚 classroom who鈥檚 effective with the same kids. This exposes a hard truth: It鈥檚 not the kids but the teaching that鈥檚 the problem. When the teacher sees 鈥渋ncapable鈥� kids succeed, it shifts their mindset.
Let鈥檚 connect that to educators鈥� public-management mindset. Educators must see the benefits of private options鈥攂eyond what they get from unions鈥攖o shift our public bias. Unions acquire political power through, well, unity鈥攅tymologically, unions are about sticking together as one. The idea of diversified contracts and pay scales threatens the enterprise. As a former NEA member, I found that union leadership clearly conveyed the benefits of collective action but underplayed the costs. Thus, public educators may not see the unfavorable externalities built into their collective bargaining agreements, like or how a universal job description limits flexibility. For teachers to transcend a public-management mindset, groups like Next Education Workforce need to demonstrate benefits beyond what unions offer. If such groups can combine flexible models with strong pay, I think more public educators would be game to test the nonpublic waters.
Personally, while I have supported public charters, I鈥檝e been more tepid on private choice. One reason I鈥攁long with parents and policymakers鈥� is that , , , and other models often produce lackluster results for kids. Tax credits could encourage experimentation that could yield better outcomes, but experimenting with kids鈥� futures feels risky, especially when . To expand the embrace of choice, private options need to better mirror the gains posted by public charters.
To be clear, I agree with you that educators deserve more employment optionality. And I may have to be more risk-tolerant regarding private choice experiments, even if some educators and students are disadvantaged by ineffective actors along the way. But fundamentally we agree: If we look squarely at the disadvantages of our current system鈥攆or both kids and educators鈥攖hen preserving the status quo seems riskier than disturbing it.
