Organizing for School Transformation
Schools can combat burnout by building collective power through organizing for change.
Schools can create sustainability through building collective power
This September marks the beginning of my fourth school year outside of the classroom. For a while I felt some guilt and shame about my decision to quit teaching. It was rewarding and valuable work. And as I’ve taken on more consulting work, the sense that I took the easy way out has been hard to shake.
But setting aside whether or not I think I’m still doing valuable work from outside the classroom (I do), lately I’ve been feeling a new emotion when I think about my decision to leave teaching: anger. I feel angry because I left a job that I was good at and loved, not because I wanted to so much as I needed to. When I get the chance to visit classrooms, I still feel a pang in my heart. There’s something special about the relationships teachers get to cultivate with students and between students. I miss the creativity I put into engaging my students as well as the creativity that they demonstrated each day. And so while I don’t regret my decision to quit, I do feel sad and angry that the job felt unsustainable to me.
And what’s especially infuriating about this is that I’m clearly not the only one. We continue to see teachers leaving the profession in high numbers while fewer young people enter teacher training programs. This past year I worked with teachers in Cleveland, Western Massachusetts, and across New York City. Across diverse contexts, there was a unifying theme: Teachers are burned out. And it doesn’t have to be this way. It is a societal choice. And it is vital that schools acknowledge this reality, and find ways to organize to change it.
At the school-level there are things that more schools can do to ameliorate burnout. Schools can cultivate cultures where self-care is encouraged and community care is present. That means allowing staff to take their sick days without guilt. And building relationships where people check in on each other and help out when someone is struggling.
Creating a culture of academic excellence is also a key to fighting burnout. Educators must feel that their work matters, that they can and will help their students succeed. When educators see student growth, it leads to joy, purpose, and pride, which in turn supports sustainability.
However, there are many larger factors outside a school’s control that shape the teaching conditions that lead to educator burnout. Chief among these is what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment.” This is the intentional divestment from poor and working class communities and communities of color; the endless funding of policing and prisons in contrast to schools, hospitals, libraries, and parks that face budget shortfalls year after year. I know what it’s like to work in schools that lack resources. The kids can’t use the drinking fountains because of lead contamination. Prepping the classroom for back-to-school includes cleaning out rodent droppings from the closets. You might lose your prep period, because when teachers call out sick, substitutes don’t show up. In schools like these, educators always find a way to make it work, but it takes a toll.
The demoralizing work of swimming upstream in an under-resourced school is compounded by the more universal challenges of being a teacher in the U.S. Teachers in the U.S. generally have a heavier workload than their global peers and less time for planning. Meanwhile they contend with bureaucratic oversight at the local, state, and federal level that is more often frustrating than supportive and sometimes outright demeaning.
To adequately address school-based factors and realistically confront societal factors, schools should take an organizing approach to school change. That is, rather than thinking about a top-down solution led by administrators, schools need to think about building power within the school community and across constituencies. How might this organizing look?
It starts with articulating a clear vision. What is it that school communities want for themselves? This vision, designed collaboratively, must lay out what educators, students, and families want and deserve, not just what is possible within current constraints. Crafting this vision should involve more listening than speaking. When community members feel that their voices are heard and valued, they are more likely to fight for change.
Those leading school transformation efforts should next identify their base. In other words, who are the educators, families, and students who are invested in the vision for change. Then ask, how can they grow this base through community-building events and opportunities for the vision to be communicated.
With a vision and a base of support clarified, it is time to identify a campaign. What is an attainable, yet meaningful victory that can shift the school in the right direction. Is it adopting morning meeting as a schoolwide practice? Or is it getting funding to ensure all the bathrooms have working plumbing? Whatever that first effort entails, it should be aligned to the vision and one that excites educators, students, and families. To achieve this goal, transformation leaders must ask who are their targets? For a public school this could be a number of people: an intransigent principal, teachers reluctant to adopt new practices, or local elected officials.
Ideally this first campaign yields a win. This helps organizers draw more community members into their efforts and build momentum for another campaign. But even a loss offers opportunities for reflection, learning, and community-building that cannot be neglected.
An organizing approach to school change has exciting potential to transform school change efforts. It would be a more collaborative and inclusive approach. It would involve a power analysis so that instead of just putting new policies and practices on the shoulders of teachers it would first ask who has the power to make this change possible? Organizing for school change could be directed inwardly (i.e. pushing teachers to adopt restorative practices) or outwardly (i.e. pushing elected officials to fund restorative practices) or both simultaneously.
By crafting and communicating a clear vision, identifying bite-sized yet purposeful goals, and gradually bringing more and more people into change efforts, schools can achieve lasting and powerful transformation. I don’t think schools can singlehandedly defeat the forces that are leading to widespread burnout. But they can develop a healthy resistance to burnout through building collective power.
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