President’s Column

After more than three decades of teaching middle school science, I can’t tell you how many times my students gathered around as we placed a pipette full of food coloring into a vial of water and watched as it slowly dispersed and completely changed the water’s color.

I’ve thought about that experiment a lot lately. Much of our work doesn’t result in instant success or change. We hope that the little things we do every day in the classroom have big rewards for students down the line. These may be tried and true tactics or new and innovative ones, like restorative justice and the practice of peace circles that we explore in this issue’s feature article.

And it’s also been true with some of the major projects we’re focusing on here at MSEA.

Last December, with the stroke of a pen President Obama ended the test-obsessed No Child Left Behind era and began the era of ESSA — the Every Student Succeeds Act. Yet, as you’ll read in this issue the ripple effects of that action are just being felt in Maryland, with much still to play out on testing, closing opportunity gaps, and a new school accountability system.

We’re also continuing an urgent conversation on institutional racism here in Maryland that NEA has helped further at the national level. I’m excited that Ivory Toldson, president of the Quality Education for Minorities Network, will join us at this year’s MSEA Convention to lead an important, timely, and necessary conversation on the issue and what we can do.

Change won’t happen overnight, but it must and will come. I hope you’ll join us in these efforts. Whether you’re a new educator building out your professional community and expertise at our first-ever New Educators Conference or a veteran educator eager to advocate on ESSA, institutional racism, or a host of other issues, our union gives us the ability to be leaders in the change we will build — sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always with our hopes fixed on our students’ future.