Response to Annenberg essay

I was most struck by one aspect of the "Agency" section.  Although most of the discussion is about empowering students, the point that really stopped me in my tracks concerned teacher agency.  The specific passage was, "Teachers demonstrate agency when they take responsibility for the learning of every child and act as advocates for children against the pessimism that surrounds discussions of urban education."

This sounds, at first blush, somewhere between noble and innocuous.  But upon further reflection an almost seditious subtext is suggested.

One of the points of the article is that school districts themselves may contribute to the process of denying agency to students.  If I find myself working in such a district, and I take the Annenberg challenge to heart, I may find myself at loggerheads with my superiors.

I have no immediate thoughts about how I might negotiate my way through such a sticky wicket.  I suspect an urban teacher often finds him/herself between a dog's leg and fire hydrant in terms of competing demands from administrative types and the educational needs of students.  

The epiphany I had from reading this article is that I will need to have a list of high-gain questions to ask the various administrators, future colleagues, and students that I'll meet when I begin to interview for a job.  These questions will probe for potential constraints to my ability to exercise the kind of teacher-agency the Annenberg team advocates.  I'll try to avoid schools that appear to conspire against my exercising such agency and, instead, look for schools that seem to thrive on it.