Teacher Advocacy Helps Students beyond the Classroom

Budget cuts, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), tracking, testing, school report cards, and school food. So reads a list of issues that Linda Christensen and other K–university Portland area educators have taken on.

For the past 20 years, this teacher activist study group has spoken out on education issues to raise public awareness. They write articles for the local papers and bring teachers, and sometimes parents, together for public forums. They also invite prominent speakers to shed light on issues. 

Christensen, who is a high school literacy curriculum specialist, believes that it’s a waste of time to “moan in the faculty room,” but thinks changes can be made through organizing. “Educators need to be advocates. The majority of our days and lives are spent working in schools. We know schools. We know what works. We can talk about class size or the need for books in a way that no one else can. We’re traveling in hard times—budget cuts and top-down decision making take education out of the hands of teachers and [puts it] into the pockets of corporate publishers and politicians. In the past 20 years we have witnessed an erosion of teachers’ rights. We can’t stand idly by while public education is dismantled.”   

Teachers Are “Last Line of Protection”

In 1973 when Fred Barton started teaching and he disagreed with the prevailing educational tone of the moment, he found it relatively easy to “go into my classroom, close the door, and shut out the world, or at least control what got in.”
 
But he says that’s no longer possible because of politics’ and corporations’ infiltration of education. “Teachers have become, in many cases, the last line of protection for students from corporations who want to turn them into life-long consumers and unquestioning workers and politicians who act as the agents for those corporations,” he says.

Barton, who is coordinator of the Learning Resources Center and assistant professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing, feels this is reason enough to advocate for education issues.

As a Support for the Learning and Teaching of English (SLATE) representative, Barton helps teachers who are facing censorship challenges. As vice president for the Michigan Council of Teachers of English, Barton, along with other affiliate members, are helping to develop the next stage of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) state tests. They also are working to respond to issues such as school funding and proposed state legislation such as a bill that Barton says “ensures phonics-based reading instruction.”

Barton acknowledges that advocacy work is not easy and is not anything he signed up for as a teacher. “It is very difficult because as resistors against this corporate onslaught we are the bad guys. Our outlets are few given the privatization of politics and the corporate media, and our time is limited. No one becomes a teacher thinking they are really becoming a political activist. Teachers become teachers because they want to help students. Unfortunately, we have to realize that helping students does not take place only in the classroom, but in the boardroom and the hearing room as well.”

For his part, Barton thinks parents are key allies in education battles. “They know us and trust us to have their children’s best interests at heart. They listen to us, and politicians listen to them. I’m encouraged by the rising activism I see among parent groups around the country. I think teachers should be a big part of that.”

An Affiliate Responds

When NCTE asked its affiliates and others to write their members of Congress and governors to change NCLB’s punitive testing measures and to oppose President Bush’s plan to expand the testing of high school students, Gregory L. Bouljon, who is president of the Iowa Council of Teachers of English, e-mailed the request to the group’s board members and encouraged them to share the invitation widely. He says the group often does this with calls to action. 

Bouljon feels educators in his state have a supportive governor, which he counts as a benefit for advocacy efforts. “Iowa teachers and students are fortunate to have Tom Vilsack as their governor.  His wife, Christie, is a teacher and really knows the issues surrounding education, as does Tom. Without Tom as governor, Iowa education would have really suffered these last years. He continues to fight for more funding for schools and children, better teacher salaries (Bouljon notes that Iowa ranks 38th in teacher salaries), and more programs for early childhood literacy.”

A Response from Overseas

Even though she is in Heidelberg, Germany, as a Fulbright Scholar, Reade Dornan also took the time to respond to NCTE’s call to state an opinion about NCLB and high school testing. Dornan, who is associate professor in the English department at Michigan State University, East Lansing, wrote a paper about “how the Michigan legislature is making a mistake by proposing to substitute the SAT or ACT for our present MEAP” for a Special Interest Group at the CCCC Convention. Colleagues presented the paper at the Convention for an audience of pre-service teachers.
 
Although Dornan has written letters on education issues to state senators and to newspapers, she feels they don’t listen to her as closely as they would to someone involved with K–12 education.

Nonetheless, Dornan jumps at the chance to volunteer for state committees to design standards and tests because she feels “that is where the real work is done. I’m amazed at how potent the teacher is when influencing state administrators, especially if there is some leeway in interpreting the law. People at the State Department of Education listen intently to the suggestions and views of K–12 teachers. 

“In Michigan, it was the teachers who effectively laid out the state standards in English and it was the teachers who set the requirements for certification in Reading and Speech and Drama. Teachers were also enormously influential in designing the composition portion of the MEAP. The state administrators guided the final results with a heavy hand, but the teachers did a huge amount of the brainstorming. As a result, the composition section of the MEAP reflected local classroom practices at that time more than any assessment being used in Michigan today.”

Dornan also volunteers to work with local schools. “One of the most effective committees I worked on in the last five years was the revision of a K–12 report card for a nearby school district. We know that assessment is the tail that wags the dog. I discovered that the report card shaped the way things were taught in that district and how teachers communicated about their teaching to parents. If it is a decent tool, it can promote best practices. In this small Michigan school district, it changed from a ‘gotcha’ way of looking at student performance to a positive approach for encouraging reading and writing at all levels. Working with teachers on a bi-monthly basis, we worked out a clear understanding of what was important in education, one that we could all be proud of. It was time-consuming, but rewarding work.”