Advocacy

A variety of advocacy resources are available from other education organizations. Brief descriptions and links to these resources are included below.

The AERA Advocacy Toolkit is focused on advocacy with Members of Congress. It provides sample documents to help schedule, prepare for, and follow up on meetings with members of Congress, including tools to find your elected officials. The site includes a downloadable AERA Handbook for Education Research Advocacy that provides an overview of how Congress works, how to communicate with Congress, and how to get around Capitol Hill. Education-related bills that AERA is tracking are also linked on the site.

The AACTE Advocacy Center provides a number of resources to support educators to engage in advocacy at both the state and federal levels. On the site you will find downloadable guides and links to government sites and a section listing action alerts as issues relevant to teacher education arise. Much of the site requires password access; however, many colleges and universities have an institutional membership. Check this link to see if your institution is a member. 

NCTM provides a variety of resources to assist teachers in being stronger advocates for their profession and their professional work. While intended for mathematics teachers and mathematics teacher educators, some of these resources could be of use for teacher leaders, school boards, state/provincial and national policy makers, or other relevant community partners.

• The Advocacy Toolkit includes a multitude of tools and documents to help guide various aspects of advocacy for individual teachers, schools, school districts, and to help clearly communicate NCTM positions and with state/provincial and national policy makers and legislators. These tools can be downloaded digitally or hard copies can be shipped. Each will be briefly described below.
• Policies and Recommendations provides a link to the NCTM Legislative Platform as well as official letters outlining NCTM’s stance on relevant and emerging issues. Letters are sorted chronologically with the most recent first and are archived back to 2005.
• Advocacy in the Field includes information from two documents: The Capitol Report and the Legislative Update. The former focuses on timely issues related to policy and legislation that might be of special interest to those in mathematics education. The latter, is a monthly summary of current news and developments within Congress or other Washington entities.