Teacher-Ownership as Entrepreneurship in Public Education

Abstract

Teacher ownership is a form of entrepreneurship with considerable potential to change the practices and performance of the K-12 institution. The idea is not now a part of the discussion: everywhere the 'given' has been that if you want to be a teacher you have to be an employee. Policy discussion assumes the employer/employee, boss/worker model. The discussion need not be confined in this way. The emergence of a teacher partnership in Minnesota, now running 11 schools, suggests it is entirely conceivable that the work in schools could be organized in ways that offer an ownership opportunity to the teachers. As owners, free to control their practice and accountable for learning, teachers might in their own interest make changes and improvements in the learning activity that it has proved impossible to secure from employees through management. At the moment the opportunities for all forms of entrepreneurship, and thus for entrepreneurship to improve learning, are constrained by the structure of the institution. The traditional arrangement - districts organized as bureaus; teachers employees - could hardly be more hostile; offering few if any openings through which entrepreneurs can be admitted. Entrepreneurship can have no effect on K-12 unless the institution is first opened - by 'policy entrepreneurship' - to arrangements other than the bureau model ... to contract arrangements of one kind or another. This can be done only by changing state law. It may prove easier to open the institution to professional teacher partnerships than to the widespread use of investor-owned commercial firms.