For decades education reformers have invested countless hours and billions of dollars in teacher accountability, evaluation, testing and data movements that have failed to move the needle for urban schools. The achievement gap, sadly, has barely budged in the past 50 years. It's not because teachers aren't sufficiently held accountable- it's because they aren't empowered to lead inspired, innovative classrooms that best serve their students. Teachers, sadly, are dead last of all professions to say they have a voice in their workplace, according to Gallup. While we all get into this work to empower others, we work in totally disempowered environments. The result of these disempowered environments is too many teachers who either leave the profession entirely (“Roughly half a million U.S. teachers either move or leave the profession each year—attrition that costs the United States up to $2.2 billion annually.”) or leave our highest need schools. While education reform has been focused on “holding teachers accountable”- reformers (and funders) have missed a critical opportunity to make a difference in teacher turnover and student achievement by focusing on empowering inspired teachers instead of labeling and punishing. As a report on teacher morale from Virginia Commonwealth University concluded “Placing high-quality teachers amidst organizational dysfunction has little chance for successful school turnaround.” Most importantly, we know that teacher morale has a more significant effect on student achievement than many of the reforms that have received substantial investment over the past decade. So let’s try something different- trust teachers, those closest to the students, to build trusted schools that innovate for their students in the way most appropriate to their schools. Almost no one argues explicitly against teacher empowerment- but almost no one actually does it. We will help teachers organize to advance teacher leadership in their own schools, educate and advise local leaders on implementing teacher-powered practices, connect teachers to community members, leaders and media to use transparency and accountability to incentivize increased teacher voice, and evaluate schools on teacher empowerment and the cultivation of positive school morale.
