Seeking external support

The NEA will award up to $250,000 to local affiliates, state affiliates, or partnerships between local and state affiliates.

Check out the NGLC website to learn more about their planning and launch grants for new school models that align with Next Generation Learning principles.

It’s okay to ask others to do things, and a pattern of reciprocation (I’ll do what you ask, and you’ll do what I ask) is a powerful foundation for a relationship. When your relational account balance is high, you can afford to make some withdrawals to secure support for your school's proposal.

Under this Act, the Colorado Department of Education provides additional flexibility to schools and districts to develop innovative practices, better meet the needs of individual students and allow more autonomy to make decisions at the school-level. Innovation plans can include teacher-powered schools.

In 2009, the Minnesota Legislature passed a statute authorizing creation of a new type of district public school that incorporates autonomy, flexibility, and accountability.

The Rhode Island Educator Autonomy Working Group makes actionable recommendations to advance Governor Chafee's objective of promoting student success by allowing decisions about education to be made as close to the student level as is practical and effective.

Arne Duncan, the U.S. Secretary of Education, announced the 2014 launch of the Teach to Lead initiative and provided a rationale.

What can state leaders do to support teacher-powered schools? This section offers some ideas, including meeting with teacher-powered school leaders to identify and determine how to remove barriers to cultivating high-performing cultures.

In this EdSource piece, Charles Taylor Kerchner offers some answers to the question, “What could state governors do in order to establish legally protected zones of professional practice for teachers?”

In 2009, the Minnesota Legislature passed a statute authorizing creation of a new type of district public school that incorporates autonomy, flexibility, and accountability.

Teach to Lead is an initiative jointly convened by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and the U.S. Department of Education to advance student outcomes by expanding opportunities for teacher leadership. One means of advancing outcomes is through Leadership Labs. These are local or state-focused events focused on building stakeholder support and momentum for a specific teacher leadership idea. One such lab helped teachers at Playa del Rey Elementary School explore a teacher-powered, distributed leadership model after their principal, who had created a collaborative teacher leadership culture, departed. Leadership labs are selected from Teach to Lead Summit participants. Educators may submit their teacher-powered idea to Teach to Lead which could then be selected for a Leadership Lab.

Louise Sundin, who served 25 years as a national vice president of the American Federation of Teachers and 22 years as president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers Local 59, testifies that to improve the quality of teaching, Minnesota needs to improve the quality of the teaching job. And, if Minnesota really improves that job, it would attract and retain good people.

In Minnesota, two charter authorizers are seeking proposals from teachers who want to create teacher-powered schools.

In 2009, teachers at Hughes STEM High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, secured collective autonomy to run the school via the Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) structure negotiated in the collective bargaining agreement between the Cincinnati School Board and Cincinnati Federation of Teachers.

In this December 2011 report, the NEA Commission concluded: “We envision a teaching profession that embraces collective accountability for student learning balanced with collaborative autonomy that allows educators to do what is best for students.”

The NEA will award up to $250,000 to local affiliates, state affiliates, or partnerships between local and state affiliates to advance the goal of great public schools for every student.

What can union leaders do to support teacher-powered schools? These pages offer some ideas, including creating a separate, subsidiary support organization that reports directly to union leadership but is not obliged to conventional union culture and modes of operation.

Paul Toner writes that the Massachusetts Education Partnership is committed to supporting local school districts and unions that want to develop collaborative models of school-based reform to advance student success, including teacher-powered schools.