It can be challenging to get teacher voices into the public eye and ear. So we were especially pleased to learn how NPR in Florida is highlighting teacher perspectives in a series of reports by Miami-Dade teacher and education analyst Jeremy Glazer. His latest piece describes how a fellow teacher, now retired, recalls discovering the desire of her struggling students to read real books instead of plowing through the shortened, cleaned-up stories in a textbook. As Glazer observes,

Whenever advocates call for measuring teacher value beyond the test, there is a response by testing proponents that this other stuff is too soft or too touchy-feely. They say it isn’t rigorous. It isn’t academic

. . . The experience Ms Roberts and her students had was an intensely academic experience; it was part of what good English teaching is. And while it may or may not have had any measurable influence on their subsequent test scores, such experiences must be a part of what we talk about when we talk about good teaching.

It’s so important for the public and policy-makers to hear this!