Empowered

We elevate the voices of Washington, DC teachers to ensure that more conversations and decisions about education in the District are informed by its primary practitioners. Teachers’ on-the-ground experiences are particularly important to informing much-needed conversations about equity in our schools. We cannot expect our teachers to excel in the classroom, lead within their schools, and continue teaching in DC when they don’t feel their voices are being heard or valued. Amplifying teacher voices will therefore not only lead to policies and practices that better enable teachers to support student success, but help improve teacher morale and promote teacher leadership, supporting better retention. We don’t elevate teacher voice for the sake of it, but rather because teacher retention is the foundation and critical factor in whether all other initiatives succeed or fail.

● Work with schools directly to positively impact teacher retention by building relational trust and shared leadership
● Through our innovative workshops, teachers and school leaders work together to identify and communicate their personal and professional needs, examine how school systems either help or harm adult school culture and explore solutions to distribute leadership and ensure staff feel heard and supported in their work.
○ EmpowerEd in Schools Four Steps to Success:
♣ Self-Care and the Work-Life Relationship
♣ Relational Trust: Building Teacher-Administrator Trust
♣ Social-Emotional Competency: Communication That Builds Trust
♣ Professional Authority and Teacher Leadership

● Training and supporting DC teachers in making their voices heard through avenues like writing for publication, organization grassroots support campaigns, testifying and presenting at public forums and speaking with local officials and the media.


● Teachers embark on a year-long campaign to implement solutions they have researched and developed relevant to their issue areas on the Inquiry to Action Groups (ITAG) model successfully implemented among educators in other states. In the 2020 school year, focus groups are focusing on recruiting/retaining teachers of color; teacher turnover, Covid-response and Equity and Justice.


● Our Teacher Council is also made available as an ongoing focus group for policymakers and stakeholders to engage with questions. Researchers have already taken advantage of our monthly teacher council meetings to seek broad and diverse input that is informed by educator voice.
Activities:

Founded in 2016, EmpowerEd has built a broad and diverse coalition of DC public and charter school teachers to take on the toughest challenges in DC education and build a more equitable education system for all DC students. After ten years of progress and national recognition, a series of damaging reports in 2017 revealing graduation and attendance inflation and new reports about troubling transparency and frequent closures in the charter sector reveal how far we have to go to build an education system that works for all. EmpowerEd has taken on this challenge through focused, sustained work at the school and district-level with a core belief- when teachers lead, students succeed.

EmpowerEd is unique in our work in several ways- the coalition we have built, our structure for successful equity work, and the unique connections we make between teachers and the education infrastructure. While others, be it the Washington Teacher’s Union or outside non-profits work directly with teachers, we are unique in working to elevate teacher voice across both sectors. Second, while most groups working to elevate teacher voice are national organizations, EmpowerEd is a homegrown effort by our own D.C. teachers. This provides us a unique perspective and ability to manifest appropriate and sustainable solutions that advance the interests of D.C.’s students.

We are led by 18 teacher fellows who organize in each of DC's 8 wards and lead issue advocacy groups. We support them with organizing and advocacy training and ongoing support.

- We've put teacher turnover and retention on the map in DC and forced elected officials to address the crisis. We’ve partnered with the State Board of Education to bring together stakeholders in solving our teacher and principal retention challenges. We partnered with SBOE to welcome nearly 100 teachers, principals, community members, and policymakers to a public forum on teacher and principal retention in November 2018. This was followed up with an online feedback platform launched in December 2018 soliciting feedback on the potential solutions raised at the forum. This platform was viewed by over 450 unique visitors who provided more than 200 votes on the solutions. In January 2019, the SBOE released a memo outlining resulting recommendations for next steps under the themes of data and research, logistics and human resources, empowerment and distributed leadership, and reducing emphasis on high-stakes testing. We’re currently continuing this partnership to advance policies with all relevant agencies to ensure progress in teacher and principal retention.
- We successfully campaigned to bring more transparency to all of our schools- advocating for and achieving through legislation- open meetings for all DC schools.
- We led a groundbreaking campaign on recruiting, supporting and retaining Latinx educators in DC where there is a sizable gap between the growing student population and their teacher counterparts. As a result of our campaign we have already gotten the school system to begin paying for immigrant teacher visas, among other wins. This campaign continues.
- Our landmark Teacher Voice Summit brought together 100 change-makers in DC education and advanced agenda items like school diversity and teacher retention through conversations with the Deputy Mayor for Education and members of the DC City Council. City leaders engaged with our teachers on teacher-led solutions to a broad range of challenges and have since met many times with our teacher groups to follow through on how their work might be incorporated into new policy and/or oversight efforts.
- EmpowerEd has planned and begun piloting school-based workshops to build a sustainable, diverse and empowered teacher workforce. We have begun using survey and data work combined with powerful community building workshops to drive better retention at DC schools.
- Our advocacy has helped shape the D.C. Council’s response to the attendance and grading policy investigations, the new Education Research-Practice Partnership, the DCPS Chancellor selection, and school transparency policy among other issues. Our teachers continue to advise as new events drive the education conversation in DC, ensuring a teacher perspective- efforts council members, state board members and others have found incredibly valuable. In the past year EmpowerEd’s work has been highlighted by WAMU, NPR, The Washington Post, Education Week, WUSA and many other news outlets for our teacher-centered solutions.