Teacher Leadership: The New Way Forward

                 

Nevada has a lot of work to do if it wants to have a first class public education system. For most of us, this is not news, and anyone who has been paying attention long enough knows that the state has been struggling for years to find its way to educational achievement. The Clark County School District, the fifth largest in the nation, with over 311,000 students, makes up approximately ¾ of all of Nevada’s students. Reforming education in Nevada means improving education in the CCSD, easier said than done. The CCSD has one of the lowest graduation rates in the nation at 62.7% beating only South Carolina, New Mexico and Washington D.C.. The district’s educational challenges are far too numerous to enumerate them all, but at the top of the short list are educating English Language Learners (ELL), poverty and all of the social consequences that go with it, low per pupil funding and large class sizes. If Nevada wants to be economically competitive going into the future, we need to take bold measures and rethink how we educate Nevada’s students.    

   

Fortunately, we are in the process of transforming our education system. The state, along with forty-four others, has adopted the more rigorous Common Core State Standards, it is in the process of overhauling its teacher evaluation process, implementing a merit pay based system and has embraced educational competition by supporting the proliferation of charter schools to name a few. Nonetheless, despite these measures, our schools still reflect the 19^th century factories from which they were originally conceived. While many of the stated reforms are steps forward, we have failed to tap into the most important and underutilized resource we already have, teacher leaders.

Historically teachers have had limited options in terms of promotion and advancement. The only real path to greater responsibility and influence is to become an administrator, but that takes great teachers out of the classroom instead of where we need them most. By thinking outside of the box and creating career paths that enable master teachers to exert greater influence and positively affect student achievement, we can significantly improve educational outcomes. Teacher leadership is inchoate, but much work is being done to expand the role of the classroom teacher. Several organizations are leading the way to re-imagine teacher roles and responsibilities they include the National Education Association’s Teacher Leadership Initiate, Public Impact’s “opportunity culture,” and Educators 4 Excellence  “STEP: Supporting Teachers as Empowered Professionals” initiative.

The National Education Association (NEA) in conjunction with the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) and the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) have introduced the Teacher Leadership Initiative (TLI). TLI is a product of the organizations’ shared vision of teacher-leadership advancing the profession by giving great teachers the ability to lead. According to NEA president Dennis Van Roekel “This initiative will ultimately develop expertise and engage thousands of teacher-leaders in leadership work in schools, with NEA affiliates, and in state houses throughout the country—because every student should have the best possible educators in their schools.” TLI’s stated goals are: Define the foundational competencies of teacher leadership; Develop relevant experiences and supports to help teachers cultivate those competencies; and to activate teachers to be leaders for their profession as a result of their participation in this process. One hundred and fifty educators representing Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan and Mississippi were chosen for the 2014 pilot year.

Public Impact is a national education policy and management consulting organization, which strives to improve educational success for at risk students. One of the stated objectives of Public Impact is to create an “opportunity culture,” and develop teacher leaders who will have influence over a greater number of students. Public Impact promotes job redesign and technology to extend the reach of excellent teachers and the teams they lead, for more pay, within budget, without forcing class-size increases. Recently, Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District in North Carolina has expanded the opportunity culture model to 17 additional schools within the district and by 2017-2018 half of the district’s schools will have opportunity cultures.

Educators 4 Excellence’s stated mission is to “to ensure that the voices of classroom teachers are included in the decisions that affect our profession and our students.” In June of 2013 E4E’sTeacher Policy Team on Career Pathways published a report titled “STEP: Supporting Teachers as Empowered Professionals.” The report outlines a career trajectory for educators that empowers teachers to move up through a series of pathway steps: emerging teacher, professional teacher, lead teacher, and finally innovative teacher. As the teacher climbs up the steps she is rewarded with greater responsibility, accountability and influence.

Providing teachers with opportunities for advancement without taking them out of the classroom is a good way to tap into the expertise and experience of our great teachers that we already have. Policy makers and thought leaders will need to determine what form of teacher leadership is best for Nevada’s students. This is a bold initiative, and will require a shift in the way that we think about teachers and their roles in schools, top-down mandates that bypass teacher input and expertise is doomed to failure. Rather, a more sensible solution is to utilize teacher’s talents and allow them to be the change agents that we need to propel Nevada’s students to educational achievement.