Dissent from within: How educational insiders use protest to create policy change

This article utilizes social movement theory to analyze policy change created by site-based educators. The author uses a qualitative case study to examine how an organization comprised of teachers and administrators in New York State used protest to protect a waiver, which exempted students in their schools from having to pass statewide graduation exams. The author finds that the educators ’ ability to mobilize resources and to strategically frame their struggle in a manner that resonated with policymakers allowed the edu-cator activists to capitalize on emerging controversies surrounding the state’s assessment system and create policy change. This article provides a frame-work to understand how marginalized actors within systems of schooling organize to create change. Such a framework is becoming increasingly rel-evant as educators attempt to create space for local practice in the current top-down policy environment