The Give Teachers a Break report examines how rapidly declining test scores, childhood illiteracy and innumeracy, classroom disarray, and low rates of teacher retention are considered failures of American education policy and are often attributed to teachers themselves. But what often goes unacknowledged is the fact that teachers’ hands are tied: the sheer amount of red tape they are forced to navigate makes teaching more difficult than it needs to be and less effective and less rewarding than it should be.
That teachers are subject to regulation after regulation shows us the extent to which they are, all too often, victims, rather than perpetrators, of a bureaucratic system that ultimately bars them from spending time on what they signed up to do: helping students learn. Freeing teachers up to do just that—to teach—is in everyone’s best interest: a teaching profession that is highly valued attracts more and more people of high value and only benefits American students and our education system as a whole.
