Teacher Leaders

Bess Keller offers up an interesting story in Education Week on teacher leadership. She profiles an initiative in Massachusetts that provides an opportunity for classroom teachers to influence education policymaking and hopes to create a means to retain younger teachers in the profession.

Last year the Cambridge-based Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy named 16 early-career teachers as its first class of Teaching Fellows. These educators are being trained as advocates to influence policy and they are exploring educational issues in greater depth. In the Ed Week article, Betty Achinstein, my colleague at the New Teacher Center who studies teacher socialization, praised this project for its work to groom teachers as change agents.

The voice of the classroom teacher is all too often missing from education policy conversations. If policymakers listened, they would discover that a teacher's voice is a powerful one and could help them better understand the likely impact of proposed policies. That's not to say that teachers always know best and policymakers don't. But if policy did a better job of learning from practice, policy choices would be better informed and the gulf between policy intent and implementation might well be reduced.

Interesting fact: Paul Reville, president of the Rennie Center, will begin as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, on July 1, working directly for Governor Deval Patrick.

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