Yet, I often felt overwhelmed by the number of hats I was asked to wear and my inability to meet my students’ individual academic needs. I saw too many fall further and further behind in a rigid system built for sameness and standardization. I was frustrated and saw this frustration reflected in students as they struggled to excel.

As more and more educators consider leaving the public schools for these very reasons, now is the time for systemic change. Merely patching holes in a failing industrial-era K-12 education model will continue to deliver dismal results. Instead, now is the time to redefine the role of educators and transform their role by equipping them with the strategies needed to engage more meaningfully with their students. This can be accomplished by reorienting school around personalized, competency-based learning.

With this approach, teachers work with students to design learning experiences that empower them to progress toward their individual goals at their own pace. This facilitates a stronger relationship between students and teachers and is having a positive impact on .

Research shows positive impacts of student-centered teaching on both and . But it also with greater levels of job satisfaction among teachers in higher education. Working with hundreds of educators in dozens of states and schools, the team at KnowledgeWorks has seen first-hand how this approach positively affects teacher morale in K-12.

Educators overwhelmingly say , and they have more power than ever before to of learning and their profession. With so many teachers leaving the classroom, those who remain have an opportunity to demand more power, compensation and autonomy.

Because so much education policy and politics happens at the state level, it is critically important for educators to engage directly with state leaders and policymakers 鈥� governors, legislators, state board members and education chiefs.

Here are a few things educators should advocate for to lay the groundwork for the future they want: 

• Prioritize teacher development in a student-centered vision. State policymakers should be encouraged to create a vision for K-12 education that establishes a clear set of expectations for what students should know or be able to do by the time they graduate. This vision can then be integrated into teacher preparation, credentialing, professional development and evaluation systems. For example, Virginia created a to help educators put the state’s into practice in their classrooms. The Council of Chief State School Officers and Jobs for the Future also detailed for personalized learning that states could use as a baseline. At least have similar visions in place, providing examples for other states looking to explore personalized learning possibilities.
  
• Build capacity for professional learning. State policymakers can rethink professional development, evaluation systems and school leadership programs by creating professional learning communities for educators across the state to share lessons learned. These networks can also be leveraged to disseminate best practices statewide. KnowledgeWorks has helped facilitate these learning networks in states including South Carolina, North Dakota, Arizona and Ohio. Districts could also explore pathways to personalized, competency-based learning by offering that acknowledge a specialized skill a teacher has learned. This allows educators to earn points toward demonstrating mastery in personalized-learning classroom practices and can be used to recognize and reward ongoing professional development.
  
• Incentivize and learn from district innovation. With education innovations taking shape in and districts across the country, many states have examples of personalized learning and corresponding shifts in educator practice that are ripe for replication. One state, South Carolina, has created that allow schools to achieve this by learning from others.
  
• Start small. To implement a sustainable shift to personalized, competency-based learning, teacher preparation and professional development programs will need to be reformulated to better equip teachers with the strategies needed to promote competency-based learning. However, state policymakers might first seek to reorient smaller programs around personalized learning practices. For example, and districts have established teacher residency programs for aspiring educators where this could occur. Policymakers might also consider dedicating resources or allowing districts to implement teacher residencies oriented around personalized-learning approaches.
  
• Connect to postsecondary education. States should also consider engaging with the burgeoning to inform their teacher preparation programs. Arizona State University, boasting one of the largest teachers colleges in the country, has been working with KnowledgeWorks over the past 18 months to unveil a personalized, competency-based learning specialization during the next semester.

These are just some ideas for teachers to begin advocating for the transformational changes needed to the nation’s traditional delivery of education. More ideas and state level examples can be found in this short policymakers’ guide, . 

Now, more than ever, teacher voices are needed to help advocate for the state-level changes that are needed to create a sustainable education system and teaching profession for the future.

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, 鈥淟ook, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn鈥檛 just end pre-K investments 鈥� we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).鈥�

To be sure, there鈥檚 a showing that early education programs are effective. They鈥檙e among we can make! But that doesn鈥檛 stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It鈥檚 a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas 鈥� the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society 鈥� rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it 鈥渨orks鈥� on some other array of distant metrics.聽

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford鈥檚 Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released showing that well-regulated charters tend to be for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. of charter schools鈥� academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for 鈥渇ailing鈥� to fully in all places and at all times. It鈥檚 not that there鈥檚 no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that with tend to generally be than comparable public schools. It鈥檚 just that, too often, even are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants鈥� future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and . Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants鈥� long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against 鈥渆xperimenting on schools and kids.鈥� But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work鈥攎uddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children鈥檚 school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids 鈥� find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. ). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts 鈥� find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it鈥檚 frustrating to see refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, ).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That鈥檚 a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as . Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids鈥攂ut . Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools鈥s also likely to fall short. (Add in , and a , though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that鈥檚 no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.