Connecting Genuine Teacher Development to the Struggle for Social Justice

In this paper I will share with you some of my hopes and concerns about the so-called second wave of educational reform in North America which has stressed the need to improve schooling by improving the status, power, and working conditions of teachers. This emphasis on teachers as the most important actors in educational reform has come after belated recognition, by at least some educational reformers and administrators, of the futility of attempting to improve schools primarily through greater external prescription of school processes and outcomes. For the last 25 years, I have worked hard as an elementary school teacher, teacher center director, and university teacher educator either to prepare student teachers to be active agents in their own professional development and in determining the direction of schools, or in supporting the efforts of teachers who were already engaged in doing so. It would be very easy for me to spend all of this paper delineating the numerous reasons why we should make teacher development, teacher learning, and teacher empowerment absolute priorities in our efforts to improve schooling for everybody's children, or in describing some of the exemplary schools where this is now a reality. It is still important to do this. Even today with all of the talk of teacher empowerment and teacher development, we see a general disregard for the craft knowledge of good teachers in th