We continue our series “Insert Title Here” with James Liou of Equal Measure in conversation with Laura Boyce (above), the Pennsylvania Executive Director at Teach Plus. Also see Laura’s recent op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer: “Kids on the supposed ‘McDonald’s track’ are living in a rigged system.”

James: Laura, I’m particularly excited to transition the conversation in this series to a focus on public education.

Laura: Thanks so much for inviting me into this conversation, James! As a former teacher and principal, I always believe it’s a good time to discuss public education, but we’re at a particularly critical moment in public education right now.

James: Tell us more.

Laura: It’s a time of great contradictions and paradoxes: parents have come to understand the complexity and challenges of teaching, as they tried to support student learning at home throughout the pandemic. Yet prolonged school closures and fights over masking and reopening have eroded trust between parents and teachers in really concerning ways. Education was seen as a top issue in the most recent general election, but that renewed interest hasn’t been accompanied by consensus around actually funding education, including early childhood education.

In addition, alarming research on learning loss and student trauma makes clear the urgency of supporting the social-emotional as well as academic needs of students, particularly for historically underserved students most negatively impacted by the pandemic. Spiraling staffing shortages and teacher exhaustion make such support nearly impossible.

COVID has strained the public education system in ways we’re only beginning to understand, but in most cases, we haven’t seen the promised “reimagining” of education away from the status quo that was promised on the other side. Several times a week, I’m hearing from teachers and principals all over Pennsylvania a similar message: “This is the hardest, least sustainable, most demoralizing things have ever been.” 

James: Thank you for such a provocative and impassioned opening, Laura. Before we further dive into the current context of public education and your work leading Teach Plus in Pennsylvania, what struck you about the preceding conversations in this series with Hanh and Eric?

Laura: I really enjoyed both conversations. With Hanh, I was struck by the ideas of addressing short-term needs versus supporting long-term systemic change. That’s a tension I see in the public education sector as well: it’s so much easier for philanthropic leaders to create a fund to purchase tangible needs like laptops or such technology than to address larger structural issues such as the ways our education system is designed and funded. I also was drawn to Eric’s discussion of unrestricted grantmaking and its power—when we consider the challenges facing public education and the teaching profession, the flexibility and trust to experiment and address emergent needs would be transformative.

James: Can you tell us about Teach Plus, and its mission, goals, and activities? How would you want the average Pennsylvanian to describe its work and relationship to public education? The average educator who might be teaching in one of our 500 districts statewide?

Laura: Teach Plus is a national education nonprofit that empowers excellent, experienced, and diverse teachers to take leadership over key policy and practice issues that advance equity, opportunity, and student success. We do that through instructional leadership programs that grow teachers’ skills in facilitating the learning of their peers, improving instruction based on data and research, and leading change efforts in their schools and districts. For example, through partnerships with the School District of Philadelphia and Independence Mission Schools we support elementary teacher leaders who are facilitating professional learning communities with grade-level peers to improve collaboration, instruction, and ultimately student outcomes.

We also develop teachers as education policy advocates through our statewide teaching policy fellowships. In Pennsylvania, we work with 35 outstanding teachers from across the state to deepen their understanding of how policies are made that impact their classrooms, and support them in advocating for equitable policies in areas such as early childhood education, school funding, teacher preparation, and teacher diversity. In short, we work to empower those closest to students and families to solve the challenges facing their schools and students through both instructional practice and policy change.

James: In what ways has that mission and work changed since the pandemic and the renewed calls to action regarding racial equity and justice across the nation?

Laura: I’d say that the pandemic and the movement for racial justice in the wake of George Floyd’s murder accelerated work Teach Plus was already doing to become an organization more explicitly focused on racial equity. We have been working to align our systems and culture with our values around racial equity, to invest in staff development and learning in this area, and to ensure our staff and senior leadership reflect the students and teachers we serve.

Our instructional practice team in Philadelphia began leading antiracism modules with our teacher leaders three years ago that have now become a part of our training of teacher leaders across the country. Teacher leaders reflect on their racial autobiographies and the racial lenses they gravitate toward, talk about how race and equity show up at the personal, interpersonal, and systems level, and develop tools and trust for having brave conversations about race across lines of difference, including with leaders and policymakers. Our policy priorities have also been impacted: we’ve seen more of our policy fellows gravitate toward issues such as building culturally affirming schools for students and teachers of color, diversifying the teacher pipeline, and addressing racial inequities in school funding.

James: Both sound like wonderfully promising work—and complementary, as well.  Do you think the changes you mentioned above are enough?

Laura: I don’t think you can look at the current realities, whether in our schools or in society as a whole, and say “we’re done.” But, I feel confident that we’ve started to identify some of the major equity-related issues to address within our public education system. And I think we’ve started to identify some starting points in terms of solutions. It will take more time, more resources, and more people working together to make the solutions happen.

Let me give you two examples from the policy side. In the past few years, I’ve seen tremendous progress in the ability of policymakers and the general public to identify inequitable school funding and teacher diversity as problems in Pennsylvania. The public, policymakers, and funders understand that our system of relying on local wealth to fund schools is fundamentally and structurally problematic, and that having a racially homogenous teaching force that is unreflective of the student population is unacceptable. They want to do something about it, and that’s big progress from people who hadn’t previously seen or acknowledged these things as priorities.

And we have some good ideas to at least start solving the problem. One example was a Level Up proposal that our fellows worked on to accelerate funding to the most underfunded schools in the state, which won bipartisan PA legislative support in the last budget (but represented a tiny fraction of what’s actually needed).

James: Let’s focus in on the idea of the fundamental, root causes of the challenges that currently face many school districts and individual schools within them. From your perspective and role at Teach Plus, what are they?  What are the ways they might be addressed?

Laura: Wow, where to begin? I guess I’d start with W.E.B. Du Bois’ idea that a system cannot fail those it was never meant to protect, so an honest reckoning has to start with the idea that our education system, like all the systems in America, was not initially designed to benefit all students. And at the same time, for the past several decades, if not longer, we’ve increasingly as a society pointed to the education system as the solution to all the other inequities in society, without ever really grappling with the ways in which it actually perpetuates and widens inequities—or what we would have to change to make schools truly equitable and antiracist. I fundamentally believe in the potential for education to be a force for equity and a solution to the most pressing problems we face as a society. But if we’re going to get there, we’re going to have to get a lot more comfortable with upending how it’s currently designed, funded, and staffed—and who wins and loses because of those choices.

From my perspective at Teach Plus, one key step forward is to have the people closest to the system become a part of redesigning it. That means that students and families have to participate in these conversations, and it also means that teachers must join in devising the solutions, rather than having solutions imposed on them.

James: Can you share a moment that comes to mind in the context above that gives you hope? Or illustrates the complexity of this work?

Laura: At Teach Plus, we recently engaged teachers all over the country in a design thinking project called The Phoenix Project. The idea was to use lessons from COVID-19 to create a better, more equitable education system for students. Teachers worked on four different categories: thriving students, thriving teachers, engaged families and communities, and teaching and learning for the 2020s. The resulting report is a blueprint for a path forward in education, and it reaffirms my belief in the power of bringing teachers to the table to solve our biggest challenges in education. At the same time, implementing these recommendations—from reimagining the school day and year to creating pathways to teaching and leadership to engaging families as partners and experts—will be extremely complex and challenging, and we’ll need continued teacher voice and leadership and advocacy to move from ideas to reality.

James:  Given that the name of this conversation series is “Insert Title Here,” what title would you give to the work you’re leading now, particularly in response to the question I posed up top from this conversation series?  And what’s the best way for us to follow your work here in Pennsylvania, and/or the national work of Teach Plus?

Laura: I believe that teachers are some of the greatest untapped resources when it comes to solving the pressing problems facing our schools and education system. I believe there is no problem too big to be solved if we leverage the collective brilliance of teachers, students, and families, and no problem—no matter how small—will be solved without teachers actively part of the solution. So I’d call our work simply “Tapping and Teaching Teachers to Transform Education.”

You can follow our work in Pennsylvania by subscribing to Teach Plus PA’s newsletter, following us on Facebook and Twitter, and (if you’re an educator) joining our statewide teacher network. And you can always email me at lboyce@teachplus.org. You can follow our work nationally by subscribing to our national newsletter.

James: I’d love to end with the idea of what seems to be an increasing “interdisciplinary-ness” of social sector issues—whether within education, environmental justice, public health, or housing: the root causes of what were once approached as stand-alone sector issues are in fact deeply interconnected.  What do you think of that idea?  How does that land in relationship to your work in education and teacher leadership?

Laura: It absolutely resonates. I’ve been reading the recently released book version of The 1619 Project, and regardless of your views on the most-debated (good faith) question related to the project regarding the role of slavery in motivating the American Revolution, it’s been an important reminder for me of how our country’s unique history and values inform every one of our system, across centuries. Any steps we take toward equity and truly valuing the lives, minds, and futures of children of color in American must grapple with each of the interconnected systems—all of which must be redesigned to serve, celebrate, and lift up all of us.

James: Laura, thank you so much for this conversation, and the progress you’re promoting here in Pennsylvania. You’ve planted a lot of seeds, synthesized so many complex issues, and pointed to a number of resources and examples that I hope are accessed and shared broadly. Readers, let us know how this conversation resonated with you—or the conversations it helps to prompt in your own work.  And funders, if this work sparks something new for you, please reach out directly to Laura!

Lastly, stay tuned for the next conversation in the series, where I’ll aim to bring focus and elevate insights from educators, parents, and students here in Philadelphia.