There are two ways to look at this: you can either stay in education and help from the inside, or you can leave and try to fix it from the outside. Here’s why that’s a problem:
1. As an educator, you feel as though education is your strength- not policy writing or fund raising or politics. Anything other than education, and we give up our advantage of knowledge. That sits poorly with me.
2. We, as educators, want to help students succeed. That’s what we do. We don’t want to sit in endless meetings fretting about getting re-elected.
3. Politics rewards “good enough.” People aren’t excited to rip apart a functioning system for the promise of a better one. If what’s working now is working, the consensus seems to be to let it be.
Given all this, it’s no wonder that the politicians that decide education policy and the educators that execute that policy have so little in common.