Lots of people saying it right now. Here’s blogger Beth Shaum saying it cogently in a post on her site, Use Your Outside Voice.  Happily, she includes a brief portrait of an outstanding classroom for adults. Then there are a string of comments responding to the blog post, “Why Teachers Should Educate the Public About the Profession,” which we just featured in a post ourselves last week. A typical comment on this appeared on ASCD’s LinkedIn site .  Here’s another on that site. And yet another essay, this one by Kevin Meuwissen, on Education Week’s site Oct. 15th saying that teachers have an important role to play politically, since education is inevitably political.

So more and more voices say teachers must speak out but we need the teachers. So I challenge every one of these commentators and bloggers to take steps themselves to actually make it happen, rather than just saying it’s a good idea. Get a teacher to write about his or her work and help get it published on the web or the print media. Write a portrait of a great teacher yourself and get it published on the web or in print.

I figure that I had better be doing the same myself, or I’ll be guilty of the same talking-the-talking-but-not walking-the-walk. So take a look at my latest effort — teacher Catherine Clarke’s lovely piece that I posted on my blog, “Teachers Speak Up,” on http://evanston.patch.com .