At present, a sense of perpetual tension exists between teachers and education systems globally. A 2023 study of 28 OECD countries demonstrated that teachers, along with feeling devalued in media and society, feel that they have little influence on education policymaking. The study highlights that educators attribute their increasing levels of burnout with, not only this lack of influence, but also diminishing autonomy, growing workload, and insufficient compensation that result from such uninformed policies. While leading a discussion with the General Secretary of Education International David Edwards on celebrating World Teachers’ Day during the height of the pandemic, Will Brehm opens the door to discussing the root causes of the multiple challenges that educators are facing:

There’s an interesting thing with planning where you really do want to involve teachers, of course, through most of educational planning. And I know in normal times that even is often difficult to do. Usually, these plans get concocted by ministries, by donors, by external experts, and then sort of just given down from on high to teachers to go and implement and it causes a lot of tension. (14:32)

Edwards expounds on these observations by discussing the impact teachers’ unions and similar organizations have on the development sphere, intentionally highlighting the effects of Covid-era reforms on the relationship between educators and education system. He specifies that such policies lead to a cycle of miscommunication which erodes the trust that educators have in the process of education reform itself.

And so, there’s that issue of lack of information, misinformation, lack of dialogue, lack of trust, and this sort of belief that teachers will just -no one really thought of teachers too and school personnel. (13:49)

The cycle of miscommunication has only been exacerbated by further policy reform attempts. Michele Schweisfurth elaborates on this growing sense of dread regarding education in her episode “Unpacking the Learning Crisis”, where she discusses how the language that development organizations employ to discuss these tensions has increased in intensity – evolving from “crisis” to “loss” and “catastrophe”.  John Merrow narrows in on policy as a catalyst for this downward spiral in his book “Addicted to Reform”, where he elucidates policymakers’ tendency to target the symptoms of learning crises rather than addressing systemic causes:

Because if you accept the paradigm, if you accept the system we have now, which is the teachers are the workers, and the students are the product, then you say, “Well, let’s improve the teachers.” “Let’s raise their pay.” “Let’s raise the standards.” “Let’s watch them more closely.” And those are little reforms you can put into place and therefore you say, “Well, we made the system better.” … The difficulty is, once you accept that model: teachers are workers, kids are product, then you start reforming that. But to my view, it’s like adding a couple more horses to the Pony Express. That’s not an efficient way to deliver the mail. (4:03)

Merrow’s indictment of development strategies which treat teachers as policy objects rather than policy agents runs parallel to Schweisfurth’s emphasis on the expertise educators possess, which is often excluded from their positioning in education development. While remaining careful to eschew viewing teachers through a rose-colored lens, she expounds on Merrow’s critique of “teacher-as-worker” logic by highlighting the potential teachers hold to offer key insights to their context:

…there are people who are motivated by less than noble motivations, but I think, yes, teachers in conjunction with communities, in conjunction with learners as well have something to say about what building back better means to them, and what that might mean for how classrooms operate. … there’s really interesting ethnographic work done about how teachers respond in a minute-by-minute kind of way to what’s going on in the classroom, and what students collectively and individually need. (17:48)

This unique positioning of educators as community leaders that Schweisfurth mentions is well-acknowledged by fellow researchers (such as Foxhall et al., who situate the leadership of educators in response to COVID amongst a history of teachers-as-community-organizers), however education development remains at the nascent stages of systematizing a teacher-as-professional approach to including educators in development efforts. During his episode with Pasi Sahlberg, Glenn Savage proposes reorienting the guiding question of “what works” to instead “what might work here”, an approach which underscores context’s inextricable influence on education reform.

…and it brings a here into the mix, which is context. So, it’s not to say let’s give up talking about evidence, because obviously that’s not what we want. We want to be thinking about impact and the different implications of different practices we have. But I think it always needs to be seen through a contextual lens. And if systems can set themselves up in ways that allow people to do that contextually based experimental work, we will avoid the kind of prison of what I’ve called alignment thinking, where you just got to line everybody up and get them all doing the same thing… (17:22)

The path forward is clear: the education development sphere must pivot from imposing top-down solutions in favor of supporting locally led initiatives which empower educators and leverage their expertise. We have progressed beyond questions of “what” and “why” and arrived at the “how”. Our organization, TEAL (the Teachers’ Empowerment and Advocacy League) is working to operationalize Sahlberg and Savage’s core “what might work here” question through our “classroom-up” approach. By providing teachers with co-constructed and accessible pathways to engage in experimental policy and curriculum work, we strive to achieve practical reforms that are grounded in the unique reality of each community in every context. Our goal is not just to listen to teachers, but to empower them as the primary developers of educational change.

December 3, 2025