Reform School

Can a million teachers marching on Washington this fall force change in the country's approach to education policy?

Teacher Myra Sawyers hopes so.

The 35-year-old Sawyers, a former aide to the late Hawaii Congresswoman Patsy Mink, is a first grade teacher at Wakefield School, a pre-K-12 private school in Virginia. She is also the leader of an effort to mobilize a million-teacher march on the nation's capitol this fall before the November presidential election.

"Reform should come from teachers, not from outsiders," says Sawyers, who left Capitol Hill in 1999 and has been in the classroom -- both as a student and as a teacher -- since then. Sawyers hopes to draw attention to the problems in the Bush administration's sweeping education reform policies, particularly the No Child Left Behind legislation.

She is hardly alone in her protests. Since the NCLB Act's passage two years ago, state officials, school superintendents, teachers, and a host of education researchers have weighed in with critiques of the law, from the common refrain that it's under-funded to the outcries over its extreme emphasis on high-stakes, standardized testing.

In the past three months, lawmakers in 14 states, including Utah and Virginia, which boast Republican-controlled legislatures, have passed non-binding resolutions against the law, claiming it violates states' rights. While those measures are primarily symbolic, they do signal a growing dissatisfaction -- and some education officials are planning action that is more dramatic.

John Mackiel, Omaha Public Schools Superintendent, and Frederick Morton, Superintendent of Montgomery County Public Schools in Christiansburg, Virginia, are preparing a class-action lawsuit against the federal government over NCLB, again centered on what they view as the federal government's intrusion on states' rights. "Who should be making education policy in this country?" Morton asked an audience of fellow school administrators rhetorically at a February conference in San Francisco. "And if it is the federal government, should that policy be as prescriptive as NCLB?"

Morton also raised issue with the law's creation, claiming there was virtually no input from anyone outside of Washington, D.C. and the U.S. Department of Education. "I think four people wrote this law," he said.

While Sawyers' mission is different than Morton's, she shares his view that education policy needs to happen closer to the classroom, and that teachers have to take a much more active role in shaping that policy.

The planned march, however, isn't a last-ditch attempt to further disparage NCLB -- though Sawyers admits that would be a fine ancillary benefit. (In March, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would relax some of the law's teacher certification requirements). The march in fact signals the launch of a new organization Sawyers has founded -- Educators for Progressive Instructional Change (EPIC).

Sawyers is quick to note that EPIC would not be a third teachers union. Instead, she sees it more as a loose collection of local groups, each able to discuss and take positions on specific issues that impact their individual districts -- unlike the two large, national teacher unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which she says are concerned mostly with adding members, not pursuing reforms.

"There is no organization that allows teachers to organize themselves," says Sawyers. She envisions EPIC growing almost as a Tupperware business: individuals spreading the word one coffee klatch at a time.

Hidden in that quaint notion, though, is Sawyer's radical idea of teacher as activist. It's a role that runs counter to the current model of a classroom teacher, according to Sawyers, yet has never been more important.