The schools of my youth were mom ‘n pop joints, built by and for the community of stakeholders they most immediately served. They had a bottom-up feel to them, an elasticity that felt organic instead of imposed. Did they fail? Sure. Like the locally owned diner where I still breakfast during weekend visits to my hometown, there were often a few wayward onion bits hiding in pancake bites, so to speak.

And, also like my diner, these schools were a bit limited with the resources they could provide, handcuffed to a degree by their insistence on the go-it-alone philosophy, the same philosophy that made them unique in the first place.

I once overheard someone ask a server in my diner for a list of gluten-free items. I remember seeing in the server the same look teachers used to give to the suggestion of “the autism spectrum.” Brain and dietary research alike have come along way indeed.

An unwelcome jolt of savory with my sweet is not all I get from my diner, though. There are also otherworldly concoctions that warm the belly and soul in ways a value meal never could. My diner serves up the fruits of the mad scientists in the kitchen, among them a cinnamon roll of such gargantuan size and decadence that one can’t possibly have a bad day after enjoying one. That diner also hosts chili-eating contests and other signatures of the community you just can’t get at the bevy of chain restaurants in the area.

And while McDonald’s may not practice such gastronomic alchemy in their kitchens, they do provide consistency. The menu items are market-tested and research-proven to please. You can hanker for a double cheeseburger all day and know your craving will be realized in exactly the way you expected. It is designed to be impervious to human error with its prepackaged ingredients and proscribed preparation methods.  In its predictability it consistently meets with projections, but it never wows. In squelching the individuality of the preparer it precludes any hope of novelty. This attracts the cook who brings no new ideas to the craft because new ideas are not welcome. Try asking your fast food server for a different preparation of your sandwich sometime.

I was asked once as a young teacher whether I thought teaching was an art or a science. The question still leaps at me from time to time. I usually settle on thinking it’s both, and should employ the strengths of each. Our parents, public, administrators and legislators are right to expect results the same way shareholders for McDonalds expect profits. Inflexible menu items and proscribed practices are often the results of such expectations, as said items and methods have been very profitable for those whose focus is the bottom line alone.

Other states abandoned their search for artists long ago. With the constant advance of strictly scientific approaches, Iowa’s getting there. Sometimes a kid is going to need some ketchup on their fish, or a preparation method not spelled out in the HR training manual. Iowa needs practitioners of the science in our kitchens who have not abandoned their artistic flair. We need to be a little bit McDonald’s, and a great deal more diner in our school environments.

Iowa teachers can accept — to a degree — the franchising of our classrooms, and the increasing homogenization of what we’re allowed to do within them. We can trust that what appears on the menus we’re given is research-based best practice. Those in power — parents, administrators, and legislators — in turn need to understand the type of business they’re dictating with endless mandates. The mandates may be market-tested to please the public, but are too inflexible to respond artfully to our students. New needs will always arise in the classroom, needs that demand the mind of an artist and the drive of an inventor. I worry that what we’re attracting to education with new teachers is too much efficient burger-flipper and not enough intrepid chef.

Iowa should never return to the diner approach alone and ignore what we know to be best practice, even if those folksier schools felt so much better. But we shouldn’t throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Our franchises need room to breathe so we’re not left staring numbly at our customers and apologizing to them that what they need is not on the menu.

After all, who are we to say that sauerkraut doesn’t belong in an omelet?

— Jacob Cummer is an Iowa City elementary teacher and author of the children’s novel Catching Crazy.