A study of teacher empowerment: Lucretia Crocker Fellows in Massachusetts

Teacher empowerment has emerged as an important theme in the educational reform of the 1980\u27s. Increasingly the commitment of capable teachers to their work has come to be seen as vital to the success of public schools. Low pay, lack of prestige and status, burnout, unfulfilled expectations, disinterested students, intrusive administrators, isolation from other adults, etc. have been cited as factors that lead to lack of commitment or turnover in the teaching profession. In the absence of nationally led reforms, individual states have begun to look at how teachers might be empowered in their work as a means of countering these issues. In the fall of 1986, the Massachusetts legislature funded twelve fellowships named after the 19th century educational reformer, Lucretia Crocker. These fellowships were intended for experienced, capable public school teachers who had designed and successfully implemented their own programs in their home school districts. By means of the fellowships these teachers spend one year relieved of their regular teaching duties in exchange for sharing their educational approaches with other public school teachers. The fellowships were to be a means of changing the teaching profession by permitting empowered teachers to share the means of their empowerment with others in the profession. Yet to more fully understand teacher empowerment we need to understand the meaning which it occupies in the daily life of the teacher. After interviewing six Lucretia Crocker Fellows at different points in their fellowship year, the study discovers that these teachers feel empowerment when there is an alignment of their values with the operational values of the system in which they work. Yet current educational reform in ignoring the values of the individual teacher in favor of technical and structural solutions to educational issues frequently risks being irrelevant or contradictory to the daily life of the teacher. This study concludes that for these six fellows empowerment was more often a result of their personal initiative and fortuitous chance rather than a consequence of organizational planning or educational policy