Teachers Count:Support for Teachers Work in the Context of State Reform

Teachers are the central agents of change in the movement towards the highquality education system that so many desire in Washington State. Without  them, what is envisioned by the state's decade-long reform movement can not be realized. High expectations and standards-based reform prompt many questions about how well classroom teachers are supported in their efforts to offer a high-quality education to the state's schoolchildren. Answering such questions presumes good data about the teacher workforce as a whole, and a mechanism for gathering accurate information directly from teachers about their practice, working conditions, and response to reform. The analyses contained in this report-derived from multiple surveys of a representative sample (n=400) of Washington's classroom teachers, supplemented by analyses of a database of all 55,000 teachers in the state-demonstrates what these kinds of information sources can do.