We believe that policy matters to education, and teachers matter to policy. In this issue, we offer a comparative examination of K–12 teacher voice in the policymaking process and the various ways in which policies influence teacher perception and practice in the classroom and beyond. Exploration and amplification of authentic teacher voice is especially critical in our current political context, where attacks on public institutions are laid bare in policy discourse, proposals, and enactment. Although these dynamics certainly are not new, they now are pervasive, particularly fraught, and increasingly explicit. It is in this specific sociopolitical context that we frame this issue along two basic assumptions. First, because discourse matters, we must constantly name, analyze, and critique the ways in which people—especially those in positions of power—talk about youth, families, schools, teachers, the goals of education, the problems schools and families face, the solutions and strengths schools and families bring, and the role of society in the endeavor of public education. We must offer purposeful voices in the discourses around “truths” in our society. Second, we argue that it is imperative that researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders carefully consider and get messy in the specifics of policy. It is in the details, the individual contexts, and the lived realities of particular educational policies that we are able to understand their importance and their capacity to elicit real change. This issue provides a conversation across research, policy, and practice, and features the voices of practicing and preservice teachers as well as researchers, teacher education faculty, and policy advocates.
In Section I, we asked our commentators, Juan Gabriel Sánchez and Dr. Leigh Patel, to pose a question to practicing teachers that is central to the themes raised in this issue. Sanchez and Patel consider the impact that high-stakes testing in particular has had on teachers' conceptions of policy and advocacy. Specifically, they asked: What happens to teacher voice in school operations when incoming generations of teachers have experienced their own K–12 schooling in an era of high-stakes assessments? We then asked a group of preservice and practicing K–12 teachers to respond to the question. The conversation offered by these commentators and teachers centers the issue squarely in the context of teachers’ lived experiences around a central contemporary educational policy issue. It is important to read the teacher commentaries as an entree into future possibilities in teacher education, research, and activism.
In Section II, we transition from specific teacher responses around the policy context of high-stakes testing into nuanced and in-depth examinations of teachers’ interactions with particular education policies at both the federal and state levels. Concerning the federal level, Jones, Khalil, and Dixon examine teacher advocacy around ESSA and the ways that structural support can support or constrain that advocacy. Turning to a state-specific policy, Hara then focuses on preservice teacher sensemaking around the Rethinking Equity in Teaching English Language Learners (RETELL) policy in Massachusetts. Finally, Swalwell, Schweber, Sinclair, Gallagher, and Schirmer delve deeply into the impact of state policies on practicing teachers’ collective bargaining rights. These three articles display how details and individual contexts of specific policies are important and meaningful.
Section III then shifts the focus of the issue to the overarching dynamics and contexts involved in the relationship between teachers and policy. In particular, Good, Barocas, Chávez-Moreno, Feldman, and Canela employ institutional theory to examine how the very nature of teachers' work impacts their ability to act as policy agents. Next, Robert offers a conceptual exploration of how teachers may act as “policy protagonists” in the new public spaces offered through digital media. Last, Stevenson places the dynamics of policy, accountability movements, and teacher resistance in historical and international contexts. A focus on the larger implications of teachers’ roles in policy represents a call to action and serves as a charge to consider the ways in which teachers, researchers, education faculty, and policymakers can amplify teacher voice and support teacher involvement in the policymaking process. We, like our commentators and contributors, conceive of this issue as an opening to further conversation about and action in new, and potentially disruptive, teacher involvement in educational policy.
We would like to thank: Juan Gabriel Sanchez and Dr. Leigh Patel for weaving thoughtful threads through the various components of this issue, posing critical questions, and making a call to action, the preservice and practicing teachers who took time and thought in the middle of their nearly impossible professional worlds to write about the real contexts of their own lived experiences, our contributors for offering their careful work and thought to situate the central questions and assumptions of the dynamics between teachers and policy in both theoretical frames and empirical explorations, and finally the editorial staff of the Peabody Journal of Education for the opportunity to collaborate on this issue.