Teacher-Advocates Respond to ESSA: “Support the Good Parts—Resist the Bad Parts”

Abstract

Although researchers consider them powerful, teacher policy advocates are among the least studied stakeholders in U.S. public education reform today. Although plenty of attention has been given to the impact of policy on teachers' work, little research explores how teachers interpret or interact with policy. Drawing on the work of Spillane, Reiser, and Reimer (2002) on teachers' policy implementation and Coburn's (2001) work on teachers' collective sense-making of policy, this qualitative study examines the different ways in which five teachers interpreted, translated, and enacted a response to ESSA. The findings describe how contextual factors influence teachers' relationship with education policy: (a) structural supports for grassroots involvement via social networks are instrumental in mobilizing teachers, and (b) unless a more bottom-up approach is taken that enables teacher agency, sense-making, and advocacy, top-down school policies will continue to hold limited promise. The paper concludes with implications for understanding how teachers are indeed policy advocates.

Notes

1 At the time of this study, all three authors were at Howard University.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Denisha Jones

Denisha Jones is an assistant professor of early childhood and elementary education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Trinity Washington University. Her research includes developing critical consciousness in pre-service teachers, organizing activist research projects that challenge the privatization of public education, and leveraging the intersection of public policy, social movement lawyering, and critical social justice education to dismantle the neoliberal assault on public education.

Deena Khalil

Deena Khalil is an assistant professor in the School of Education at Howard University. Her research focuses on the issues related to accessing and constructing diverse and equitable learning environments, both nationally and internationally, and how such access is linked to the micro socio-cultural and macro socio-political dynamics of public education. By serving on several highly competitive grants, she and her co-investigators work with P-20 educators to iteratively disrupt and critically transform the design of STEM ecologies for nondominant, minoritized and trans-indigenous learners.

R. Davis Dixon

R. Davis Dixon is a P-12 Research Associate at The Education Trust in Washington, DC. Currently, he conducts primary and secondary research that will inform discussion and debate among education decision-makers at the national, state, and local levels. Additionally, his research interest include teaching effectiveness, professional development interventions for teachers, and math interventions for students deemed to be at risk A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Davis completed his master's and doctoral work in developmental psychology at Howard University and holds a bachelor's in psychology from North Carolina Central University.