This is the second in our series of current and former teachers who play a role in making the policies that impact our district and state. This profile is on Margo Roen, Deputy Chief Portfolio Officer at the Achievement School District (ASD).
One might say that the arts brought Margo Roen into the teaching profession. As an undergraduate at Tulane in New Orleans, she was first exposed to the low quality of public education across the city first hand when she taught extracurricular dance classes through the New Orleans Ballet Association (NOBA).
It was an eye opener. She decided to change her career goal from being an arts administrator to being a teacher.
As a part of our series on education leaders, we’re exploring how different policy makers in our community have gotten to where they are today, what motivates them, and what advice they have for teachers looking to accomplish something similar. In this piece, we’ll take a closer look at one former (and future) teacher in Margo Roen and learn how her experiences have influenced her as a policy maker.
Becoming a Teacher
Margo (“Ms. Roen” to her students) is an outstanding example of how teaching can inform the decisions of policy makers. Even as she works with the ASD, she aspires to return to the classroom someday to do what she considers the most important work in education.
But perhaps most notably, Margo never thought about teaching as a profession. At least not at first.
She says that she played teacher as a child, modeling her dad (himself an educator), but didn’t plan on becoming a teacher when she went off to college in New Orleans. Once there, she was struck by the incredible divide she saw between the city’s great wealth and great poverty, and came to realize the role education played in New Orleans’ longstanding inequalities.
So she got into schools through her work with NOBA, and made the official career switch from business and dance to education when she signed up to join the Teach for America corps in New Orleans. For five years, she taught “everything in high school math and science” from remedial math to freshman physics.
It’s almost impossible to talk about education in New Orleans without mentioning Hurricane Katrina, and the hurricane had a huge impact on Margo when it struck in August of 2005.
Katrina caused untold damage to the New Orleans community, and made an indelible impact on Margo’s teaching career. While continuing to work as a classroom teacher, she helped out with teachNOLA to recruit displaced teachers back to New Orleans’ classrooms the year after the storm. She also worked with Teach for America to help ensure that new corps members were placed in schools that were a good fit. These experiences taught her the importance of ensuring that education systems employ people who are truly great—whether they’ve been in the classroom for years or are new to the profession.
Her time as a teacher also taught her the power of education to change lives. As a high school teacher, she knew her students were bright and capable of anything. Yet the average 9th grader came to her school reading far below grade level, averaging around a 4th grade level after the storm. These same students, through hard work and a lot of support, graduated reading on grade level.
According to Margo, “I’ve seen kids in high school come in very low and get caught up by the time they leave in four short years.” This taught her not to put limits on what kids are capable of accomplishing. This teaching experience pre- and post-Katrina would have profound implications for her future in education.
Getting Involved with Policy
Margo knows first-hand that it can be a bit scary to get involved with policy the first time. It took her three years or so before she felt comfortable enough as a teacher to venture out into other ways of getting involved in education.
Because of this, she encourages teachers to stay in the classroom longer than one or two years. She believes that “the people who still have their feet in the classroom and stay in the classroom have the most power.” She also believes in the powerful link between teaching and personal accountability. “Nothing holds you accountable as a person like working with kids every day!” she says.
The longer you are in the classroom, the more capable you will be of making an impact simply because you’ll know more and more. “You definitely need the experience so that you can have the extra bandwidth to get involved on a broader scale” she says.
Fortunately, she notes, Memphis has a lot of ways that teachers can get involved in Memphis. We have a large network of organizations including SCORE, Teach Plus, Stand for Children and others that actively seek out the voices of teachers to influence policy and programs.
Leaving the Classroom
After ten years in New Orleans, including experiencing Hurricane Katrina, Margo says that she had learned and felt so much, but it was time to move on and build on her experiences.
She’d spent four more years in the classroom and had helped to rebuild the education system by recruiting teachers back to the city. She had worked in both a traditional public school and a nonprofit charter public school. She had seen the creation of the Recovery School District and the impacts it was having on the education landscape. And so she decided that she had to take a step back and look at everything with a more methodical view to try and figure out how to improve the system as a whole. That’s when she made the decision to go to graduate school to pursue a Masters in Education Policy.
She made this decision for a number of reasons, but chief among these was the desire to, as she says, “remove herself from the bubble and see what I really learned from my time in New Orleans.”
She spent three years at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, the last two years of the program finishing the degree on the weekends while working full time to help launch the ASD. She shared she was eager to work with the Achievement School District because she saw it as very similar to the Recovery School District in New Orleans and as an opportunity to shape a district that was truly centered on students.
Work with the ASD
Margo believes firmly that “the folks we impact most directly should have a direct voice.” During her work with the ASD, she has worked to act on what she learned from her classroom experience.
For example, she’s worked to make sure that we have great people involved in education here in Tennessee, much as she did in New Orleans, through working with the best local and national nonprofit charter schools. She’s played a key role in the creation of the Achievement Advisory Council, which has been vital in surfacing community voice throughout the turnaround and transition process.
She also decided to flip the governance structure of schools to provide feedback about policy through the Operator Advisory council, a council of school leaders who vet and vote on district policy. “Had I never worked in a school, I would have never known that leveraging the expertise of educators is the best way to make sure that you have a comprehensive policy, one that truly has the students’ best interests in mind.”
Back to the Classroom?
Although Margo left the classroom, she says that her heart is still there. She hopes one day to return, and this time she’ll take her experience as a policy maker to her teaching. One thing she says her experience has helped her do is to take the idea of policy implementation more seriously.
“Before, my mentality as a teacher was that I was going to only control what’s going on in [my] four walls and work hard to have an impact on the students I directly taught. As a teacher it’s easy to focus on just your kids and forget that it’s much bigger than you and your kids.” She says that her new mentality is to take a global view of education as opposed to just a classroom specific view. This includes thinking more about supports for students outside of the classroom and the broader role of the school community in ensuring each child’s success.
Final Words for Teachers
While she encourages teachers to stay and use their voices as educators, she also notes that there are many existing opportunities for teachers outside their classrooms, especially here in Tennessee.
“There are a lot of great segues here in Tennessee” she notes. For example, teacher core coaches can go on to work for state and regional education programs. We also have a lot of great graduate school programs for teachers to take advantage of.
One caution that she gives teachers is that things take time. Whether individually or organizationally, “people tend to be in a rush to move to the next step and make things happen overnight.” Constantly looking to the next thing is a disservice to your students and to yourself as an educator. “And I promise you, you will never find a job as tiring and inspiring, as frustrating and rewarding, and as important as educating children.”
We’d like to thank Ms. Roen for being a part of our inaugural series on current and former teachers as policy leaders and advocates. Know someone you’d like to see profiled? Send us their contact info at [email protected]!