Reading my articles from the fellowship feels like reading diary entries.
They’re raw, honest, and you can tell I was struggling—big time—with teaching at the time.
Overwhelm shows up on the page.
So does frustration.
I was also living through the part of the pandemic that didn’t end neatly: being impacted by COVID-19 and the year of fully remote learning for students.
As a teacher, returning to writing has been a way of going back to questions that pulled me toward the classroom in the first place.
Since leaving the classroom almost two years ago, I’ve returned to writing frequently to work through the questions teaching left me with.
Even so, it wasn’t just personal reflection.
I wanted answers that felt bigger than me.
Why outcomes weren’t just about classrooms
Having attended Title I public schools myself, I walked into teaching looking for a lens—something to make sense of my own school experiences.
I became more interested in education as an engine of social mobility, but the more I asked why, the more the “single school or single teacher” story stopped working.
I wanted to understand why some kids learned to read and some did not.
I wanted to understand why some schools had more resources than others.
I wanted to understand why some kids went to college, and some did not.
Teaching felt like a way to move closer to those answers.
The process was swift and painful.
The stark reality was playing out in front of me every day as I taught at a public charter school during the day and then drove to the suburbs in the evenings to tutor for extra cash.
Some mornings, I’d still hear that familiar classroom buzz—paper rustling, a projector fan humming in the background—and it was hard not to wonder what happened to the kids once the doors closed.
Here’s what I learned, and I learned it the hard way: some kids can read because their schools taught phonics and screened for reading disabilities in kindergarten.
Some schools have more resources because housing policy and decades of segregation shaped property values and neighborhood composition.
Some kids go to college because they benefited from networks of financial and familial stability, giving them resilience through challenges like the SAT, the Common App and FAFSA.
The questions I began with spun out into winding tangles of policy choices, zip codes, race and class.
What has to change beyond school walls
Then came the grief—more than being overwhelmed and overworked.
It felt like the undoing of my belief that education was society’s great equalizer.
It was also the realization that I’d been lucky.
My graduation from high school and matriculation to a four-year college was as much a function of my family’s assumption from birth that I would go to college as it was my academic performance or the opportunities my schools offered.
Achieving academically was easy because I had stable housing, good health care and a network of loving and supportive adults.
Had I experienced any learning challenges, they would have been swiftly addressed by my white-collar parents, who are comfortable speaking with educated professionals.
Students spend the vast majority of their lives before the age of 18 outside of school.
Teaching revealed how profoundly the promise of education depends on systems beyond the classroom.
That doesn’t mean schools and teachers can’t move the needle.
Teachers grow their students every day in ways that feel nothing short of miraculous.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an adult who cannot name a teacher who made a difference in their life.
But the biggest gains come when the systems around schools align to support the work teachers are doing—when children arrive at school healthier, safer and more secure in their lives outside the classroom.
On this front, there are two movements I’ve been paying attention to, one that brings me hope and one that makes me nervous.
In graduate school, I learned about place-based partnerships—initiatives that bring stakeholders in health care, housing, education, youth services, local government and philanthropy into alignment around shared goals for supporting children and families.
The most famous example is the Harlem Children’s Zone, but the model has spread widely.
Organizations like StriveTogether now support networks of communities working toward cradle-to-career outcomes.
Partners for Rural Impact is helping rural communities coordinate services for children across schools and social supports.
Here in Boston, the Boston Children’s Council is bringing together city agencies, nonprofits and schools to think more holistically about the conditions shaping children’s lives.
What gives me hope about these efforts is that they acknowledge something teachers already know: students do not arrive at school as blank slates each morning.
They arrive carrying the cumulative effects of housing stability, health-care access, nutrition, family income and community safety.
Place-based partnerships represent a policy approach that supports teachers by strengthening the ecosystems around them rather than asking schools to solve poverty alone.
What makes me more uneasy is the direction some of the frustration with public education has taken.
If we spent decades telling ourselves that schools were the great equalizer, then the persistence of large racial and economic achievement gaps, especially in the wake of COVID frustrations, can feel like a failure of the institution itself.
In my home state of West Virginia, that frustration has helped fuel support for the Hope Scholarship, the nation’s only universal education savings account program, which has deleterious impacts on the public education system most students rely on.
Policies like this are often framed as empowering families with choice, but I worry they also reflect a disillusionment with the project of public schools as engines of democracy.
It is my belief that many of the inequities in public education were never fully within schools’ control to address.
My experience as a teacher, and now as a policy practitioner, has convinced me that the path forward is not to abandon public schools, but to surround them with stronger systems of support for children and families.
The question I’m paying closest attention to now is how policy can help build those systems: partnerships that allow teachers to do what they already do best, while ensuring the conditions outside the classroom make their work possible—and I keep coming back to that, honestly, because it still feels like the missing piece.
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