Today I read Robert Pondiscio’s piece, Public Schools Are Molds Not Platforms, and he’s right about something fundamental: public schools are not platforms for personal expression or ideological performance. They are civic institutions with a public mandate. A teacher in a classroom is not a freelance partisan activist — they are a public servant with … Continue reading Are Teachers Change Agents?
Today I read Robert Pondiscio’s piece, Public Schools Are Molds Not Platforms, and he’s right about something fundamental: public schools are not platforms for personal expression or ideological performance. They are civic institutions with a public mandate. A teacher in a classroom is not a freelance partisan activist — they are a public servant with a constrained, technical responsibility.
But here’s where I want to extend the argument: The problem is not that teachers shouldn’t see themselves as change agents.
Learning itself is change — a change in long-term memory – after all.
The problem is that pockets of the profession are susceptible to adopting a theory of change that is, at best, theatrical, and in worse cases, crosses into outright misuse of authority, all while abandoning the kind of change that alters life trajectories.
In truth, I haven’t seen much direct political indoctrination in the lessons I observe. What I do see, far more often, is another form of abdication: teachers declaring — sometimes proudly — that they are too punk rock to follow the curriculum, that they will “do what feels right for their kids,” regardless of how that decision undermines coherence for future teachers and disrupts students’ ability to follow the learning sequence that comes next. The result is an educational lottery for parents, where a random draw determines whether a child receives the actual academic curriculum or gets rerouted into what Mike Schmoker called the “Crayola Curriculum” — where large portions of instructional time are replaced with busy time-fillers and Pinterest projects masquerading as learning.
In my work with schools, I’m constantly struck by how urgency — the “let’s make every second count” mentality — has slipped out of the system. We seem increasingly oblivious to the costs of inefficiency on other people’s children — especially when the consequences don’t show up until years later in the form of quiet illiteracy and dropping out. For me, a sense of urgency belongs inside the definition of a true change agent: someone who understands that school is a one-time, non-repeatable opportunity for a child to gain a world-class education — and acts accordingly.
If we want a picture of real change agency, look to Project Follow Through — by many estimates the largest educational study ever conducted. While most instructional models failed to produce reliable gains for disadvantaged students, Direct Instruction consistently moved students up, often outperforming grade-level expectations in reading, language, and math. And DI didn’t just raise academic performance — it raised self-esteem. Not through stand-alone social-emotional lessons, but through instructional engineering that made success the default outcome.
And look at the people who made it happen. Linda Carnine, Marcy Stein, Jerry Silbert, Susie Andrist — and many more. They were young teachers in their twenties, going school to school, scripts in hand, coaching educators in housing projects, underserved communities, and working-class districts — places where kids weren’t expected to win academically. They weren’t stylized activists recruited to “raise consciousness” and “rethink education.” They were there to get every kid to mastery. For me, they are the true social justice warriors, whether or not they ever used that label.
Direct Instruction has always had this vision of change. It doesn’t ask teachers to express themselves, but it does ask them to bring passion and personality. It asks them to master variables — attention, pacing, correction, group response efficiency, repeat until firm — without needing to invent curriculum from scratch or rely on improvisation. It treats teaching as a science of reliable effects, not an act of creative disruption. In this way, it is genuinely student-centered — because adult preferences are always subordinated to student learning needs.
Seen through this lens, it becomes easier to say it plainly: I am, proudly, a change agent of student competence. My job is to take a child from Point A to Point B in enabling knowledge and skill faster than they would ever get there without me. In a profession obsessed with “disrupting the status quo,” the most radical act may simply be to teach the curriculum with relentless precision and get kids further than the system expects them to go.
So yes — public schools should not be ideological platforms. But they also cannot be holding patterns where adults go through the motions while children lose cognitive ground. The correct posture is neither activist-performer nor neutral bureaucrat, but teacher — a professional who wakes up each day with one narrow, but honorable mission: teach the heck out of this stuff.
That is the only form of change the public has authorized – and once we reclaim this mission, we can start to earn back the trust that has been quietly eroding.
