When teachers become activists

Ever since the 1990s — when the accountability movement entered into a loose coalition with the movement for school choice and market-driven reform — U.S. teachers have been all but shut out of federal, state, and local educational decision making. Increasingly, their expertise has been questioned and their voices dismissed. They’ve been scapegoated by reformers, put under surveillance in the classroom, and told to follow scripted lessons (Kumashiro, 2012). And in the meantime, as the influence of testing company lobbyists, billionaire philanthropists, and for-profit providers has grown, the strength of the unions (historically teachers’ most powerful advocates) has declined. 

Teachers in the U.S. never have enjoyed truly professional status, but rarely have they been excluded so deliberately from important decisions about policy and practice. As a result, reformers’ plans have often been in direct opposition to what teachers know about quality education. It is no surprise, then, that the reforms of the last few decades have failed to deliver what they promised.  

This state of affairs has not gone uncontested, however. In many parts of the country, groups of teacher activists — often in collaboration with parents, students, and community members — have organized themselves into a sort of countermovement, dedicated to challenging policies and practices that hurt their students, impede their teaching, and undermine their profession (Picower, 2012).