Teachers Talk Back: NY Policy Team Member Natalie Harrington

Natalie Harrington is a high school English teacher in the Bronx and a member of E4E-New York’s Principal Evaluation Policy Team. She shares why principals need to be held to high standards and how policy teams alleviate the isolation of the classroom.

What are you excited about now that the paper is coming together?

I’m excited to get it out of this room and have people read it and have people hear about what we’ve been doing in here, have people talk about principal evaluations because as we’ve noted in the press up until this point it’s all about teacher evaluations, and I think it’s important that people see the link between these two issues, that an evaluation of teachers is only as good as the evaluator, so we need to make sure that our principals are held to the highest standard and those at the helm of our city schools are the best and brightest.

What does a policy team do?

A policy team is a group of teachers who get together and talk about an issue they feel is affecting them and their students. The objective of the policy team is to take these thoughts that teachers have about a particular issue and get their voices out of just the classroom. I joined the policy team because I think it’s crucial that we have teacher voices in the policy arena and so that’s what the policy team does.

What have you enjoyed most about the process?

I love getting together with a group of teachers from different schools, different disciplines, different grades, and hearing that I’m not the only one who’s struggling with issues at my school. Teaching can be an isolating profession, especially when you’re bogged down in your classroom, and it’s nice to see that there are others out there who are fighting the good fight and are working towards similar goals. It makes you feel supported.

What’s unique about a teacher policy team?

A policy team allows teachers to share their voices, and that’s something that’s been missing up until this point in education policy. Decisions have been made on a higher level without much thought about what’s happening on the ground. We live in the trenches, and we can provide a unique perspective on what our students need and what really is happening in our schools. Once that voice is included, I believe that meaningful change can happen, because once you start from the bottom you can figure out what actually needs to be done. That’s what our policy team is finding with principal and teacher evaluations: all these things are linked, and if we can’t find a way to fix both, then we’ll fix nothing.