

Megan Allen (Center for Teaching Quality)

Megan Allen is a veteran English teacher who was the 2010 Florida Teacher of the Year and a finalist for National Teacher of the Year. She is also a National Board Certified Teacher. But she left Florida with her morale extremely low because of a series of reforms that she felt were targeting teachers in ways that unfairly hurt them as well as their students.

Florida has been at the center of corporate-influenced school reform that uses standardized test scores to evaluate students, teachers, schools, etc. In a Web post, she explains her reasons for leaving the Sunshine State, where half of a teacher’s evaluation comes from student standardized test scores (called “value-added measures” or VAM).

Last year Allen testified before Congress about how high-needs students would be affected if Congress allowed budget cuts to go through that would affect education funding. She served as a teacherpreneur at the nonprofit Center for Teaching Quality, teaching in a hybrid role in one of Florida’s highest-need schools while also advancing Common Core and teaching evaluation reforms that make sense for students and the teaching profession that serves them.

She is n now on the education faculty of Mount Holyoke College where she teaches a new course — Teacherpreneurs and Teacher Leadership: The Changing Role of Educators.

This is what Megan Allen wrote on the Center for Teaching Quality Web site (and below is her video):