Teaching Unraveled Belief in Education’s Promise

A former Voices of Change fellow reflects on how teaching—and COVID-era remote learning—shattered her belief that education is the great equalizer, while also pointing to place-based partnerships and policy choices like universal education savings accounts as

When Avery Thrush returned to writing after leaving the classroom almost two years ago. the early entries read like a record of overwhelm. She remembers the kind of strain that doesn’t disappear after the school day ends—especially for a teacher who was “impacted by COVID-19 and the year of fully remote learning for students.”.

Thrush’s work traces back to the Voices of Change fellowship. a program that gave her space to name the questions that had first pulled her toward teaching. The series she is contributing to marks the five-year anniversary of that fellowship. Thrush. now a LEE Fellow at the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. says going back to her fellowships’ articles felt raw and honest—her own struggles written plainly.

She had attended Title I public schools herself. In the classroom. she wanted a lens for understanding her own experience. but she also arrived with a bigger ambition: to understand education as a mechanism of social mobility. Why did some students learn to read and others did not?. Why did some schools have more resources than others?. Why did some students go to college—and others didn’t?.

The answers, she says, did not come from any single teacher or school. Instead. the patterns formed an “aligned system of supports” that begins at birth and continues long after a child is seated in a classroom. Thrush taught during the day at a public charter school. then drove to the suburbs in the evenings to tutor for extra cash. That rhythm, she says, quickly made visible how student success isn’t produced in one place.

Some children, she learned, 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 students go to college because networks of financial and familial stability helped them build resilience through challenges like the SAT. the Common App and FAFSA.

What started as questions about teaching became a tangle of policy choices, zip codes, race and class.

The grief Thrush describes at leaving the classroom wasn’t only about being overwhelmed and overworked. It was also the undoing of her belief that education is society’s great equalizer. She writes that she had been lucky: her graduation from high school and matriculation to a four-year college was. in her telling. as much a function of her family’s assumption from birth that she would attend college as it was her academic performance or the opportunities her schools offered. She says achieving academically was “easy” because of stable housing. good health care and a network of loving and supportive adults—and because her parents were the kind of adults who could address learning challenges quickly by speaking with educated professionals.

Thrush argues that this is where teaching changed her perspective most. Students, she says, spend the vast majority of their lives before age 18 outside of school. “Teaching revealed how profoundly the promise of education depends on systems beyond the classroom.”

Still, she doesn’t dismiss the role of schools and teachers. She says teachers grow students every day in ways that can feel miraculous. and that most adults can name a teacher who made a difference. But she puts the biggest gains where she believes they belong: when the systems around schools align to support the work teachers are doing—when children arrive at school healthier. safer and more secure.

In that push, Thrush has been watching two movements at once: one that gives her hope and another that makes her uneasy.

In graduate school. she 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, she writes, is the Harlem Children’s Zone, and she says the model has spread widely. She points to StriveTogether, which supports networks of communities working toward cradle-to-career outcomes. She also names Partners for Rural Impact, which helps rural communities coordinate services for children across schools and social supports. Here in Boston. she writes that 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 her hope, Thrush says, is that these efforts treat students as more than blank slates. They acknowledge children arrive carrying the cumulative effects of housing stability, health-care access, nutrition, family income and community safety. For her. place-based partnerships are a policy approach that strengthens ecosystems around schools instead of asking schools to solve poverty alone.

What makes her more uneasy is how some frustration with public education has turned. If. for decades. people have told themselves that schools are the great equalizer. then the persistence of large racial and economic achievement gaps—especially after COVID frustrations—can feel like the institution itself has failed. In West Virginia. she writes. that frustration has helped fuel support for the Hope Scholarship. which she calls “the nation’s only universal education savings account program. ” and she says it has deleterious impacts on the public education system most students rely on.

Thrush says policies like these are often framed as empowering families with choice. but she worries they reflect disillusionment with the project of public schools as engines of democracy. Her belief, in her account, is that many inequities in public education were never fully within schools’ control to address.

So her question now is not whether public schools should be abandoned, but how policy can build stronger systems of support for children and families—partnerships that allow teachers to do what they do best while ensuring conditions outside the classroom make that work possible.

This story is part of an EdSurge series chronicling diverse educator experiences. The pieces are made publicly available with support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and EdSurge maintains editorial control over all content. The work is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Thrush is a West Virginia native and former educator.

Voices of Change fellowship Avery Thrush education equity COVID-19 remote learning Title I place-based partnerships Harlem Children’s Zone StriveTogether Partners for Rural Impact Boston Children’s Council Hope Scholarship education savings accounts Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education LEE Fellow