Enhancing teacher performance: The role of professional autonomy

Current teacher accountability initiatives such as those included in the "No Child Left Behind" legislation in the United States create particular difficulties that impact deleteriously on the performance of professional educators. The quality of public education is undermined when teachers are held accountable to an external authority rather than to themselves, their colleagues, and their professional associations. In this article, and in response to this concern, we argue that for teachers to strengthen their classroom performance, policy renewal is required on two separate fronts: first, we must restructure teachers' working conditions to support autonomous professional activity related to education; and second, teachers, both individually and collectively, must accept the concomitant responsibility to pursue personal professional development to improve their pedagogical work. © Springer 2010.