About Where We Agree
Educators for Excellence ensures that teachers have a leading voice in the policies that impact their students and profession.
Our education system is at a critical inflection point. It is essential that teachers unions and school system leaders rise to the dual challenges of: Radically improving the education system for our students, particularly those who have been impacted by inequitable opportunities, while also reimagining the teaching profession. Improvements must reflect the diverse views of teachers and the communities they serve.
In 2022, we asked, “Where can we find contract innovation?”
For the past six years, E4E has published a national, scientific survey of over 1,000 educators– Voices from the Classroom–to uplift the perspectives of teachers on a variety of topics. The data has illustrated that the working conditions of teachers must change to make the profession more rewarding, diverse, dynamic, collaborative, sustainable, and student-centered.
In 2023, E4E’s National Teacher Leader Council, comprising 15 teacher leaders in E4E chapters across the country, examined the survey data and a landscape analysis of 50 teachers’ contracts, completed in partnership with TNTP. As a result, they made policy recommendations on how teachers’ contracts could improve the profession. E4E, in partnership with the Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, set out to find examples where our teachers’ recommendations were already reflected in teachers’ contracts and impacting teachers’ and students’ day-to-day experience, right now.
We also partnered with CPRL to develop a framework that labor, management, and community can use to design contracts aligned with these principles.
Read the paper: “Designing Contracts for a Modern Classroom: The ABCs of CBAs”
Educators for Excellence and Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL) at Columbia University, June 2024
Email me these ideas for modern contracts.
