Teach Strong: An Education Platform to Unite the Democratic Party

_{In a Friday, Jan. 30, 2015 photo, Julie Lammer, left, an art teacher, helps Julie Borgwardt, a physical education teacher, with a program during a training session, at Lincoln Elementary School in Dubuque, Iowa. (AP/Telegraph Herald, Jessica Reilly)}

RCEd Commentary

That a deep tension exists among Democrats on K-12 education has been the longtime narrative from Washington. But that’s not the full truth.

Two of the largest bulwarks of the Democratic Party—the civil rights community and teachers’ unions—have been publicly at odds over their K-12 agendas, clashing over issues from testing and the use of student data in teacher evaluations to the Common Core State Standards and charter schools. Because of these policy disagreements, some have warned candidates like Hillary Clinton to avoid the topic of education altogether for fear that any mention of K-12 will further divide the Democratic base.

However, this week’s launch of a new national coalition—Teach Strong—shows that Democrats are in fact strongly united around one seminal K-12 issue: the need to elevate and modernize the teaching profession. Specifically, the campaign brings together over 40 diverse stakeholders ranging from teachers’ unions to more traditional education “reformers” with the hope of making the issue of attracting, preparing, and retaining excellent teachers the top K-12 priority for policymakers for years to come.

While some reporters may have expressed skepticism about the ability for 40 divergent groups to make notable change, one thing is clear: all contributing organizations recognize that having an excellent teacher in front of every classroom is the No. 1 in-school way to increase student success, making it a key lever for effecting widespread change and making our country a mobility machine once again.

But as Third Way’s own polling of high-achieving Millennials showed in a 2014 report, “Teaching: The Next Generation,” there is a serious problem with how young people—including the 3 million we will need to fill our classrooms in the next ten years—view the profession today.

Only 17 percent of those polled said they would be very interested in teaching, with 50 percent citing the profession as becoming less prestigious in the last few years. This poor perception comes as no surprise given that this same group of students ranked teaching as the No. 1 profession that “average” or “mediocre” people go into, and only 35 percent cited teachers as “smart.” In addition, Millennials listed “opportunities to advance within the profession,” and “salaries for those established in the career” as two of the most important factors taken into account when selecting a job. Unfortunately, these are two areas where teaching falls flat.

As a result, our country is in serious jeopardy of not being able to recruit and retain top talent into the teaching profession in the years to come. Teach Strong provides a unique opportunity to focus our collective attention on making systemic changes to better align a career in the classroom with the needs of today’s workforce, including making preparation more rigorous, embedding meaningful career opportunities that recognize and reward talent, and providing teachers with the same geographic mobility experienced by other 21st Century professionals.

Focusing national attention on improving the teaching profession is not only the right thing to do to improve learning outcomes for students, but is also a popular policy agenda among voters. In another Third Way poll released last December, we found that a “modernizing teaching” agenda fared incredibly well across the board—including among key groups in the Democratic base. For example, a whopping 92 percent of Americans support “creating more opportunities for K-12 public school teachers to earn promotions and raises,” including 95 percent of Democrats, 97 percent of Millennials, and 92 percent of teachers themselves. We found similarly high levels of support for other teacher-centric reforms such as “ensuring teachers in every state pass a rigorous test of content knowledge and teaching skills,” “ensuring hiring and firing decisions are based on a teacher’s performance,” and “allowing licensed teachers to more easily move across state lines.”

It is clear that the unanimity of support for these principles runs deeper than a catchy tagline. With 40 diverse organizations deeply invested in this movement, the political will needed to modernize the teaching profession is stronger than ever. The Teach Strong campaign delivers a single message loud and clear: rather than shying away from the K-12 debate, Democratic policymakers—including those running for president—should embrace the unified front this coalition provides and use the political momentum it delivers to transform teaching into a profession that can attract and retain the next generation of excellent public school teachers.