Project Description
Transforming Education Systems Alliance (TESA) is a national movement-building alliance designed to spur and catalyze work across each of the U.S. education field’s ten subsectors toward a vision of healthy, nurturing, rigorous educational systems. Such systems support youth and adults to contribute to the well-being of all communities, in their social and professional lives.
We ground our work in an understanding of structural inequality, the role of cultural responsiveness, and the robust skills of reflection, compassion, knowledge and engaged global citizenry that youth and adults need to build thriving communities and social systems that work for us all. We recognize that educational systems play a pivotal role in youth and adult learning, complemented by the role of other systems (such as family, spiritual communities, community-based organizations and government institutions).
TESA’s purpose is to transform the national discourse about the purposes of education and how to effectively pursue it; weave the fragmented efforts in the field together that have similar a vision and values; support change agents who are deeply aligned to advance and connect work across the education subsectors; share resources, approaches and strategies; and move the education subsectors toward our collective vision.
TESA’s work focuses on the national field of education, school and district/system improvement. We focus our efforts primarily on highly influential, system-wide work (grassroots or grasstops), and we also affiliate organizations / entities that exemplify a smaller portion of this work. Our work centers around both a vision (the “what”) of equitable, democratic educational systems and the equitable systems change approaches (“how”) needed to get there.
TESA is not owned or housed by any one organization. It is structured to reflect, weave and engage the formidable efforts of change agents already afoot throughout the field as well as to spark and support the development of new, catalytic, system-wide change aligned with our vision and values.
Our work is based on The New Frontier: An Integrated Framework for Equity & Transformative Improvement in Education.
