In the 1990s, I worked as a special assistant to the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education. It was my first job after teaching, and I was full of optimism. I naively reasoned that if I told policymakers about my classroom experiences and helped them understand how their actions actually affected classrooms across the state, the laws and regulations that governed schools were certain to change for the better.
A decade later, after holding various policy jobs, I had become fully acclimated to the unspoken rules of policy, and I understood why teachers were so often excluded. There's an invisible playing field on which policy is created—and in most cases, teachers cannot see it. I made it my mission to bridge this gap between practitioners and policymakers by helping teachers understand the language and implicit expectations of policy.
Today, one of the most promising issues for which teachers can advocate is teacher leadership. The current popularity of the notion of teacher leadership has the potential to galvanize longterm changes in how the teaching career is structured. Here's a story from my own failed attempt to advocate for teacher leadership in the 1990s, which illustrates the challenges and obstacles teachers need to overcome to ensure that this time around, teacher leadership has staying power.
A Story of Advocacy Gone Wrong
One of my first assignments as a newbie to the policy world was to help secure funding for mentoring programs to support new teachers. The year was 1998. My role was to meet with legislators and other stakeholders, share my experiences as a recent teacher who saw the value of this type of support, and outline the Massachusetts Department of Education's plan for the roll-out of a new statewide program. We had built a $6 million budget for recruiting, selecting, and training teacher leaders as mentors and paying them a stipend for their extra work. I needed to make the case for putting that line item in the state budget.
I believed passionately in the work I was doing. Having had an informal mentor during my first year in the classroom, I had concrete ideas for what worked and what didn't. I was sure that by sharing my own teaching experiences, I could help legislators understand the challenges of classroom life and the need for strong induction support.
But in meeting after meeting, I struggled mightily. Although the folks on the other side of the table were polite and nominally interested in the stories of my middle schoolers and my early struggles as a teacher, their questions were on a different level—one that I was not prepared to address:
þ Are you proposing a tax hike to pay for this? If not, what would you cut from the current budget?
þ In which locations would you start, and how would you scale the program?
þ Is that really enough money to do everything you're proposing? Are program costs expected to increase or decrease over time?
þ How will we make sure the best teachers become mentors and new teachers are paired with experts in the same subject?
þ How will we know whether it is working? What does the research from other places tell us?
I had been under the mistaken impression that my job as an advocate was to help people understand my job as a teacher. In fact, what I needed to be doing was essentially the opposite: I needed to equip legislators to do their job—balancing budgets, assuring constituents that tax dollars were spent wisely, and distributing resources equitably across the system. Without addressing these issues, I didn't give policymakers the information they needed to advance the cause about which I cared so deeply. I failed to make my case on their terms. The line item never made it into the budget.
What Has Changed?
Almost two decades later, the need for teacher leadership, including mentoring, is arguably even greater than it was in the 1990s. Millennial teachers are less likely than their Baby Boomer predecessors to expect a 35-year career in the classroom. They seek a dynamic career, and the availability of leadership pathways is one strategy for retaining them. At the same time, in a teaching force in which turnover is expected, the need for structured support for the significant crops of newcomers who will enter each year grows even greater (Johnson, 2004).
In many ways, teaching has become a less desirable job. Testing and accountability have heightened pressure and, in many cases, reduced teachers' professional discretion (Sparks, Ralph, & Malkus, 2015). Leadership roles for excellent teachers are one way to offset these negative factors by enabling some to gain increased authority and be recognized for their strong contributions.
The most promising change in the past two decades is the growth in opportunities for teachers to become leaders in formal (mostly compensated) roles that allow them to expand their influence to more students. My organization, Teach Plus, offers leadership opportunities to teachers in seven states. Nonprofits with similar missions, such as Leading Educators and Public Impact, have emerged to meet teacher demand. Districts like Washington, DC, and Denver, Colorado, have become national beacons in terms of making teacher leadership a core strategy for improving service to students. Even these robust, systemic efforts, however, are relatively new and are significantly funded by short-term grants. Teacher leadership has yet to prove that it's here to stay.
The Keys to Bringing Policymakers On Board
Today's policymakers use the same set of questions to evaluate whether teacher leadership will earn a place in the budget as they did 20 years ago. The work of policymaking has three central pressures—promoting equity, allocating scarce resources, and addressing accountability issues. Successful advocates will get policymakers on their side when they can show how their teacher leadership proposals attend to these pressures.
Promoting Equity
The first responsibility and pressure policymakers face is to ensure equity. Good policy establishes the conditions for a strong education system that prepares all students for future success.
Although teachers and policymakers share the goal of providing a high-quality education for all students, they have different levers for working toward this goal. Teachers operate at the individual or small-unit level, and their influence on students is direct. They address equity by staying after school with students, connecting with parents, or engaging with colleagues to make changes to the curriculum. Policymakers address equity at the system level—allocating resources differently than in the past, enacting new laws, or enforcing new regulations. Although their influence is less direct, the size of the group they influence is much larger.
Any policymaker whom you approach with a new idea will likely want to know how it will create more equity of opportunity for students. Thus, if you want to advocate for teacher leadership, you must show how teacher leadership promotes equity. You must be able to address fundamental questions like, "If research tells us that there is variation in the quality of teachers, how does investing in teacher leadership increase all students' access to excellent teachers and teaching practices?"
Allocating Scarce Resources
The complicating factor in achieving an education system that serves students equitably is that each individual defines equity differently. People define what is equitable in the context of imperfect information gathered in their daily experiences, either in the city or the suburbs, either in the classroom or in the state house.
The way policymakers define equity matters because those definitions get translated into funding allocations, and funding is always limited. There is always more that needs to be done than money available to do it. Paid teacher leadership roles in every school, smaller class sizes, and expanded after-school programming would all be ideal, but funding all these initiatives is impossible. Policymakers must make hard tradeoffs with limited tax dollars.
As a result, "Is teacher leadership a worthy investment for helping students?" isn't really the right question. Policymakers must wrestle with the question of the relative value of investing limited education resources one way versus another. The right question is, "Will investing in teacher leadership mean more for a greater number of students than investing in other initiatives, such as smaller class sizes or after-school programming?"
Addressing Accountability
The hard tradeoffs that are the result of resource scarcity lead us to the next issue that's always on policymakers' minds: accountability. If a policymaker cares about providing all students with the best possible education but has finite resources to apply to that enterprise, then that person will (and should) seek information on what works. Further, policymakers are accountable to the public that has elected or helped to appoint them. The court of public opinion will inevitably weigh in on what's working and what's not in schools, so before investing in a school improvement initiative, policymakers have additional incentives to do their homework on how that initiative has performed in the past or in another location.
Stories from teachers about the benefits of teacher leadership—from increased feelings of professionalism, to retention of good teachers in the classroom, to job satisfaction—are nice. But policymakers tend to be more interested in the bottomline purpose of school: improving student learning. And although anecdotes and portfolios are rich in information, policymakers most often default to test scores because they allow apples-to-apples comparisons in a time-scarce world.
Teachers are correct to point out that student test scores don't offer a full view of what's happening in schools. But there is a logic and simplicity to using test scores to evaluate school improvement efforts, one that policymakers are unlikely to abandon. Those hoping to persuade them must recognize this reality. When you get that big meeting, come prepared to talk about all the student growth outcomes that matter, but I urge you not to leave test scores off that list.
A Story of Advocacy Gone Right
What would it look like if teachers knew the basic rules of the policy playing field and used them to advocate for teacher leadership? Let's look at a group of teachers with whom Teach Plus worked this past year in the Indianapolis Public Schools.
After a four-year wage freeze had decimated faculties at schools across the district, a group of teacher leaders helped break the stalemate and negotiate a new contract. They focused their argument squarely on equity, framing teacher leadership and higher starting salaries as twin strategies to ensure that every student had access to an excellent teacher. They had done their homework and found that experienced teachers were leaving the district for higher-paying communities. They documented this outsized attrition in a policy brief for district officials and wrote several op-eds expressing the position that attracting and retaining high-quality teachers was the most important investment the district could make on behalf of students.
The teachers took on the question of scarce resources head-on. Using a simulation tool developed by the nonprofit group Education Resource Strategies, they hosted an event for more than 150 teachers, the district superintendent, the union president, and several members of the school board. Small groups of teachers and leaders worked together to balance a fictitious district budget. They were forced to make tradeoffs, addressing such questions as, What percentage of teachers should be eligible for leadership roles? Should these roles include release time? Should priority go to teachers in low-performing schools? In the end, the budget priorities identified at that event were adopted in the contract.
Finally, the new system that was approved reflected a recognition that teacher leaders must be held accountable for student learning. Pay bumps for advanced degrees were eliminated. Instead, those teachers who were qualified and willing to take on multi-classroom leadership roles, with accountability for the progress of students in multiple classrooms, could earn up to $18,000 annually in additional compensation. The teacher advocates were able to get $15 million of proposed cuts to Indianapolis Public Schools restored by the legislature by making it clear that funding would support the retention of the system's strongest teachers.
Looking to the Future
Equity, resource scarcity, and accountability are the triangle-shaped boundaries that form the playing field of policy. The farther outside those boundaries you make your case, the less likely you are to influence policy. Teachers need to see this playing field to be effective advocates.
Teacher leadership is popular among those in the field today, yet the people holding the purse strings that will determine its long-term sustainability still need convincing. They seek evidence that teacher leadership works, and more important, that it works better for students than other school improvement initiatives would. I was not up to the challenge of making that case convincingly almost two decades ago with the data available at that time. Are we up to the challenge of making that case today? Are we working as hard as we can to build the evidence base that policymakers will inevitably ask for? The future of our profession depends on it.
