Home visits as a pathway to stronger teacher-powered schools Building Bridges, Not Just Classrooms November marks National Family Engagement Month, a time when we pause to reflect on what truly fuels learning: trusting relationships. As a former teacher and district leader, I’ve seen firsthand that student success is not just about what happens in the […]

Community Schools and Teacher-Powered Schools are both equity-enhancing strategies rooted and guided by the notion that the people in the schools are best positioned to shape their vision for school transformation, collectively alongside students, staff, families and broader community.  As a century-old approach, Community Schools in the U.S. were created as spaces that could disrupt […]

My name is Sujana Sabnam, and I am a senior at UCLA Community School, a teacher-powered school in Los Angeles. Having been enrolled here since kindergarten, I have had the opportunity to witness the many changes this school has gone through. I had not realized the unique ways in which the school operated until I […]

Anaheim Union High School District defines community schools as, “a safe place at the heart of a community where students, staff and families are connected and work together to expand opportunities and address the needs of the whole child so that all students can thrive and realize their ultimate potential.” The notion of shared and […]

Kelley (Kell) Cusmano and Sarah Giddings are twins and both Michigan teachers. Kell was recently named 2024-2025 Michigan Teacher of the Year. Sarah is now the director at her school, as well as a longtime TPS ambassador and an integral part of the TPS team. Many schools identified as being teacher-powered have the autonomy to […]

San Diego Education Association (SDEA) represents more than 7000 certificated district educators in San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD). The union has a long history advocating for the schools their students deserve, especially in historically marginalized communities in a racially-segregated city. Community schools are an evidence-based strategy for school improvement. They provide services and support […]

An educator’s perspective on teacher-powered schools The vast majority of teachers go into education because they want to postively impact young people’s lives. This enthusiasm is often dampened by unrealistic expectations, little opportunity for growth, a lack of support, and no real opportunity for educators to be engaged in the decision-making processes that impact the […]

Seeing is Believing While many societal institutions would benefit from systemic reform, my life’s work focuses on engineering learning systems that support secondary, undergraduate and adult learners. Twenty-three years ago, I moved out of school districts to build tangible models and lead professional development more effectively than I could from within. In my own teaching […]

It’s a Friday afternoon. Normally, students are abuzz, packing up at the end of the day, chatting about weekend plans, waiting impatiently for the clock to hit 3:00. Not this Friday, though. About 40 middle and high school students are sitting in a circle, quietly and calmly discussing what’s happening in their school, a process […]

This is the second of a two-part set of articles on Teacher Evaluation. See the first entry here. Contact Greg Fisher at schoolempowerment@gmail.com. Is there more than one way to design and run a Teacher Evaluation program? Of course there is. But why does the vast majority of schools’ deploy anachronistic and obsolete systems that are […]