Seeing Policy Change Through
In 2017, legislators passed landmark policy change on some of EdAllies’ top priorities, from overhauling the state’s broken teacher licensure system to establishing a competitive state grant to support alternative teacher preparation programs, to improving the state’s approach to disaggregating student achievement data.
The recent changes to teacher licensure and prep will help us recruit and retain great, diverse people who we know will make excellent teachers, but who have never before had the chance. Dawn Gunderson Taylor, Chief Talent Officer of Hiawatha Academies in Minneapolis Great Teachers for All Minnesota Classrooms: Progress & Next Steps, March 2018
In many ways, those changes were only the beginning of our advocacy. Throughout 2018, we worked to make sure these reforms were implemented with urgency and fidelity in alignment with the intent behind them. This meant serving as a watchdog on multiple fronts, including:
- actively participating in the teacher licensure rulemaking process and connecting our partners with opportunities to do the same;
- working with the Coalition of Asian American Leaders and MDE to guarantee that five roll-out sites and, later, all Minnesota schools, are set up to successfully implement the 2016 groundbreaking All Kids Count Act and disaggregate student achievement data by race, ethnicity, and other factors;
- serving on the Minnesota Office of Higher Education’s Alternative Teacher Preparation Grant Review Committee; and
- educating stakeholders, through a detailed report, on how investments in and supports for a stronger teacher pipeline should benefit them.
While this work doesn’t grab headlines often, we know this is the only way to guarantee that the policies for which we advocate have their intended impact on students.
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