By Mark

Education Secretrary Arne Duncan recently shared his "Teach to Lead" initiative, which has sparked some interesting responses, including this one on Education Week which discusses a couple of perspectives on the issue. (Duncan has partnered with Ron Thorpe and NBPTS to focus on "raising the visibility" of teacher leadership.)

I believe, like many others do, that teachers and teacher leadership are essential to the success of our public education system. There is a difference, though, between leadership and implementation. Rick Hess in the Education Week post linked above takes the position that Duncan's call for leadership is "a call for teachers to help promote the Obama agenda–to shill for the Common Core, celebrate new teacher evaluation systems, and be excited that the feds are here to help." My gut makes me tend to agree with Hess's interpretation of Duncan's call–something tells me that the USDE would not be thrilled with teacher-leaders who design and advocate for alternatives to the Common Core. 

Should teachers be driving the implementation of Common Core, new teacher evaluations, and all the other changes? Absolutely. However, that's driving a vehicle that someone else designed, bought, and parked in our parking lot. 

Teacher leadership and teacher implementation are two vastly different ideas about the power of teachers. The former puts decision making power in the hands of teachers: they aren't just "at the table," they get to decide who else is at the table and what is going to be served. The latter, as important in its own right, is about engaging teachers in the trenches to make successful the decisions that other people have made. Both are important, but they are not the same. Implementation is the underlying connotation of Duncan's "teacher leadership" terminology.

While I worry at what Duncan implies in his push for teacher leadership, this passage from his speech at the NBPTS Teaching and Learning Conference gives me hope:

Our aim is to encourage schools and districts, and hopefully even states, all over the country to provide more opportunities for genuine, authentic teacher leadership that don't require giving up a daily role in the classroom. And because this only works if superintendents and principals see it as part of the solution, they’ll be involved from the start.

He goes on to say:

Teacher leadership means having a voice in the policies and decisions that affect your students, your daily work, and the shape of your profession. It means guiding the growth of your colleagues. It means that teaching can't be a one-size-fits-all job — that there must be different paths based on different interests, and you don’t have to end up with the same job description that you started with. It means sharing in decisions that used to be only made by administrators — and the best administrators know they’ll make better decisions when they listen to teachers.

Am I naive to still hope this isn't empty rhetoric tailored to tell an audience of teacher-leaders what they want to hear?

This project I'm working on in my district, our pilot "Teacher Leadership Academy," is perhaps the kind of thing Duncan would like. However, as I've been building the mission and rationale, I've deliberately included language differentiating between leadership and implementation. In our Leadership Academy mission, it is written that

The participants and “graduates” of the Teacher Leader Academy are not obligated to assume any specific position or promote any specific agenda beyond those positions or agendas of his/her choice. This teacher shall not be obligated to assume formal leadership within the building or district, and further, shall not be obligated to assume any specific duties directed by a building or the district. The hope of this program is that teacher leaders will be inspired to be proactive change-makers by following their personal Path of Action in their chosen sphere of influence, and that this experience will prepare them with the skills, experiences, and dispositions that will aid them in this endeavor. Individuals with such dispositions and skills will be an asset to any building simply by their presence and positive influence. 

When Duncan says that "teacher leadership means having a voice in the policies and decisions that affect your students, your daily work, and the shape of your profession," I wonder at how he defines "having a voice." "Having a voice" and "shaping the decision" are not the same. "Having a voice" implies "say what you want, but we'll do what we want." 

Leadership requires the power to make choices that matter. Big choices. Ideally, choices where the person deciding also gets to determine what options shall be chosen from, and also has the authority to choose "none of the above."