Jonathan Schleiferis the first executive director of Educators 4 Excellence’s New York chapter. E4Ewas founded in 2010 by two Bronx public school teachers. Its mission is to “work to ensure that the voices of classroom teachers are included in the decisions that affect our profession and our students.” E4E’s members are teachers who learn, network, and take action around public policies to elevate the teaching profession and student performance.

Before coming to E4E in 2012, Schleifer was chief policy officer for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA.). Earlier, he was responsible for online communications for former New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen’s successful bid for the US Senate and he served as Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D-NY) senior policy advisor. His first job after college was teaching for five years at Middle School 303 in the Bronx, initially as a Teach for America corps member.

Schleifer has a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and another master’s degree from Columbia University’s Teachers College. He has a bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College.

Beth Leech: Your bio says that your undergraduate degree is from Rutgers University, where I teach. Were you in political science?

Jonathan Schleifer: No, I was a painter. I studied painting at the university’s Mason Gross School of the Arts, and also studied philosophy and women’s studies. One of the things that interested me most about painting, besides the expression, was studying critical theory, exploring notions of power and class and race.

Rutgers is a politically active campus and I was involved in SCREAM Theater, which is still around. There was always something to talk about and to be animated around. It’s interesting to talk to people who went to less politically engaged campuses, because their college experiences were so different from mine.

Leech: Could you explain what SCREAM [Students Challenging Realities and Educating Against Myths] Theater is, and how it helped lead you into political activism?

Schleifer: SCREAM Theater is a student-led organization that dramatically simulates the moments leading up to, including, and following domestic violence and sexual assault. We share these reenacted moments with students on campus, with the general public, law enforcement officials, judges, and those who are engaged in the courts. It was a theater group, so I played the role of someone who is a perpetrator of domestic violence and sexual assault, which was very challenging emotionally and intellectually. It gave me a chance to teach people about an issue that lives in the shadows. Most people don’t know, so they can’t empathize and they don’t intervene. One of SCREAM Theater’s main focuses was to get people to intervene when they see domestic violence.

It gave me a chance to be an educator on a significant public policy issue and to see people’s faces as they began to understand an issue that they certainly were outraged by, but didn’t know what it looked like or sounded like. I think one of the key lessons I took away from working with SCREAM is the importance of telling stories around policy issues in order to create a community that understands and empathizes with the issue.

Leech: After you graduated, what did you do?

Schleifer: I joined Teach for America.

Leech: What made you decide to do that?

Schleifer: My art studies as well as my work in SCREAM got me thinking a lot about power and how it’s distributed and abused. I wanted to move beyond just thinking and talking about it with my friends, to finding a meaningful way to engage with these issues in the real world.

I had two friends at Rutgers who graduated before me and joined Teach for America. They would call me at night and share their stories of the kids and the communities that they were working in. One was teaching in Washington Heights on the north side of Manhattan and the other was teaching outside of DC. Their experiences sounded incredibly challenging yet so meaningful. I thought I could have an immediate impact by becoming a teacher. I applied and got in. I requested to teach in an urban community and I was placed in New York City. I was assigned to be a kindergarten/first-grade teacher and went through the summer training with Teach for America. When I got to New York, there were no kindergarten or first-grade classrooms available, so they put me in middle school. I went from being trained to teach early elementary and basic reading skills to having to go through puberty over three hundred times with my students. I ended up teaching for five years at Middle School 303, from 2000 to 2005.

Leech: All in the middle school?

Schleifer: All middle school. I taught sixth grade for three years, and then I cycled up with my students. I taught the same kids sixth, seventh, and eighth grade. When they graduated from eighth grade, I graduated from teaching at that school, and I went to graduate school. Through my time teaching at Middle School 303 in the Bronx, I was always looking for different ways to involve myself in the community, and in the needs of my kids generally. I wanted them to become savvier with using the Internet, so I got our school on a sanctioned e-mail system and all my kids had e-mail before other schools were doing that. I advocated for grants to get digital cameras, laptops, and printers for my kids, so they had access to the tools that are really essential for academic and professional success. Toward the end, I required all of my students to have blogs so that they could share their work. It’s one thing to put your work on a bulletin board. It’s another thing to put it out there where people around the world can see it.

Leech: You were teaching the day of the September 11^th attacks.

Schleifer: Yes. It was a really difficult period to be a teacher, in New York especially. I became sensitized to foreign policy in a way that I hadn’t before. This is despite the fact that, growing up, I had been involved in the Zionist movement and gone to Zionist summer camps. I started the first high school AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] chapter at my high school. Those activities were core to my identity and my family being in Israel than to foreign policy per se. I hadn’t really thought about America’s place in the world. September 11th definitely changed that for me.

Leech: Because you had a lot of family in Israel?

Schleifer: Yes, most of my mother’s family. After the Holocaust, my mother’s mother came to the States and her aunts went to Israel. The majority of my family on my mother’s side is still in Israel.

After September 11th, I developed a much keener interest in what was happening internationally. I became active in the antiwar movement. I didn’t think going into Iraq was the right use of our resources at that time; it was the wrong direction. I learned how to organize from some wonderful mentors in New York, who had been involved in previous organizing movements in the past, around HIV. I learned to be a community organizer, and was involved in organizing some of the larger antiwar protests in New York City and in DC.

Leech: With any particular organizations?

Schleifer: I worked with New Yorkers Say No To War. We had been working tirelessly and the announcement that we were going to war in Iraq was deeply discouraging. We had invested so much time and energy into trying to stop it. It was a profound moment for me, having done so much to try to stop a policy, and regardless of our efforts and how deeply we believed we were on the right side—it happened anyway.

Leech: And yet you decided to stick with it.

Schleifer: Yes, absolutely. I think that’s what was transformative. I was in a fellow organizer’s home and we watched the announcement. We immediately got back to work again, which is something that I’d certainly learned from teaching as well: facing small setbacks and persevering through it.

That was partly what was so exciting about teaching, and it’s one of the things that has translated to the work that I do now: the need to distinguish between what are the true obstacles and what are false obstacles. I remember I had one student who was almost perfect. She always did her homework. Whenever I was having a rough day, she would give me a smile and let me know that it was okay. She would always help other students. She did really well on exams. One day, she came in and she was miserable. She began to become disruptive and stopped doing her homework. She was getting into fights with other girls. I figured out that it wasn’t anything pedagogical. She had strep, and she was in lots of pain. Her mother didn’t have access to affordable health care, and as a result, she didn’t even tell her mom because she knew that her mother couldn’t help her, and she didn’t want to burden her mother with something else. She just suffered with it. As you know, that’s a miserable experience, to have strep and not have it treated.

Leech: And potentially dangerous, yes.

Schleifer: Yes, but thankfully she got the treatment she needed. And I learned two things from that experience. First, to be sure to properly diagnose problems, identifying the root causes without being distracted by the symptoms. And I learned the degree to which external issues like health care affected the work that I was doing in the classroom. This and similar experiences led me to realize that I needed to leave the classroom and see how I could help improve the larger system.

I keep in touch with all my students, and I was talking to one of them about her high school experience. She was assigned a high school by lottery and she ended up in what she described as “a terrible high school” after graduating from eighth grade. Although she did well there—she was valedictorian of that “terrible high school”—the notion that a lottery could decide someone’s future in America is shocking. It’s like the plot of The Hunger Games—not something that should be driving anyone’s destiny in a country as wealthy as ours. That’s why I left the classroom to go to graduate school.

Leech: You went to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, right?

Schleifer:I went to the Kennedy School, which was great. I met my wife. I went there thinking that I’d become some sort of policy wonk. I quickly learned there were so many great ideas and so much wonderful research about education, but I didn’t get the sense that there were enough people who were invested, and trained, and skilled in making those ideas real. I worked on developing the negotiation skills, the communication skills, the political skills, and the leadership and management skills that would be required to make a difference. I had a wonderful time in graduate school and was glad I spent time studying economics and statistics, and really filling in those gaps in my experience.

I graduated after two years and left with a phenomenal cohort of classmates, who have spread throughout the world, but many ended up in DC. That’s where I ended up, working as a senior policy advisor for Representative Anthony Weiner for nine months. I worked with him prior to the scandal that ended his congressional career.

Leech: That scandal, which involved him sending sexually explicit text messages and photos to several women, must have been particularly difficult for you, given your past history and feelings.

Schleifer: Yes, it was. I think was hard for all of us in the office. It was particularly frustrating because, at the time, he had become a progressive voice in Congress. I was proud to have been associated with the speeches he was giving on the floor about health care, and his wonderful “Click and Clack” speech defending NPR. How the scandal unfolded, what it said about leadership, and the loss of a really important progressive voice in Congress—all that made it hard for me.

While I was in his office as a senior policy advisor, initially I was supposed to help design bigger policy positions for the congressman to take. Because of turnover, I ended up basically managing his DC office for him, and also staffing him on the Judiciary Committee. I learned a lot.

I got the job in Weiner’s office in large part because while I was at the Kennedy School, I had a summer fellowship in Senator Barbara Boxer’s office. I was on her domestic policy team and met some incredible people there. She has a lot of veteran staff who really took the time to mentor me and help set me up to get the job with Congressman Weiner.

I remember sitting down with my direct supervisor and walking through all the things I would need to get a job on the Hill afterwards: making sure that I wrote policy memos, making sure that I wrote talking points, and walking through that checklist so I had deliverables to show when I was applying for jobs on the Hill later on.

Leech: You used that summer to become trained.

Schleifer: Exactly. I was a policy fellow, which I think made a difference.

Leech: You were able to get that because you were coming from the Kennedy School, and not just off the street.

Schleifer: Exactly. And I asked for specific training and had the right mentors to provide it. One of the skills that I’ve seen the greatest advocates employ over and over again is that they know how to ask for things. They’re not afraid to ask over, and over, and over again. I think that’s one of the things that I had to shift in my thinking: from being a teacher, to doing advocacy work, and doing political work generally. There are conventions that insist that it’s rude to ask for things. Whereas in politics, you’re either asking on behalf of yourself, if you’re the candidate trying to raise money, or you’re asking on behalf of your boss. If you’re a staffer, you’re asking someone to support your boss’s bill, or you’re asking someone to give your boss information. You’re always asking for something. Certainly as an advocate, you’re asking for specific policy to be made into law and then effectively implemented.

To get that fellowship, I asked for it. I made very clear going into it what I wanted to do. I was happy to take phone calls, but I also wanted to be able to develop a portfolio of material that I could use to get a job later on.

Leech: You were thinking ahead.

Schleifer: At that point, I was an advocate for myself.

Leech: When you left Weiner’s office, you moved on to New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen’s campaign?

Schleifer: Yes.

Leech: How did that come about?

Schleifer: She had been a mentor of mine at the Kennedy School. She ran the Institute of Politics. She had previously lost a race. I kept offering to work on her next race, and she insisted she wasn’t going to run, but of course, she did. As soon as she announced, I packed up my car and got to New Hampshire as quickly as possible. When I got there, I just offered my services. They didn’t need a policy person. They already had someone on staff to do that. They asked me what I knew about the Internet. I had been on Facebook and e-mail, and I had done a little bit of stuff before, but I didn’t really know much about it.

What I had learned as a middle school teacher in the Bronx, without formal education training, is that I’m ready to learn anything. If I put in the time, and I think it through in the right ways, and ask the right questions, I can learn it. I can be successful. They put me in charge of the online communications, which included everything from setting up her Twitter accounts to the Facebook account, and sending out the blast e-mails for advocacy, for fundraising, doing the online advocacy, doing the online list-building. We grew the e-mail list more than two hundred times bigger than it was. We raised a good chunk of the overall budget online as well. It was a wonderful experience to be a part of a campaign, working those crazy hours with a singular goal of getting the right person elected.

People too often dismiss the political side of advocacy. The political side that I’m referring to is getting the right people in positions of power, so that they can be vehicles for the policy that you want to see achieved. Just knocking on the doors of Congress, or of the mayor’s office, or the councilman’s office, and demanding things will only get you so far. There’s a tremendous value in being a part of making sure that the right people are elected to the right offices, so that they can get the right policies in place.

Leech: If you don’t have support from these people, no amount of asking or arm-twisting is going to get what you want.

Schleifer: Yes. But it doesn’t have to be as quid pro quo as that. If you’re advocating to the wrong people over and over and over again, because your values don’t align, and your interests don’t align, then no matter how many creative ways you can come up with to communicate an idea or attack an idea, your values still aren’t going to align. The more elected officials that you can get in place who share your values and share your interest, the more elected officials are going to take your advocacy seriously and become advocates themselves for your ideas. Not only because they owe you one—though there’s certainly something there. I think more importantly, it’s because you’re aligned in principle.

Leech: Yes, you fundamentally agree.

Schleifer: It’s so much easier to talk someone into something if they agree with you in the first place.

Leech: Well put. What happened after the election?

Schleifer: After the election, I moved back to DC. I spent the time to try to figure out what was next. I was considering going back to the Hill. I was considering getting another campaign. I was really looking for something to capture me. I was looking for my next mission. A consultant who was reviewing résumés saw my résumé for another job, and thought that I’d be a good match for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. I hadn’t heard of the organization at the time, and frankly, as someone who has antiwar work on his résumé, I didn’t think that I’d even be considered.

I met with the founder of IAVA, Paul Rieckhoff, and really came to admire him and was blown away by the work that IAVA was doing. I think what was really interesting to me was coming back full circle. Having disagreed with the war initially, I now had an opportunity to serve the men and women whose patriotism and commitment to country and to their community are so profound that they would serve regardless of their position on the war. I think it’s an incredible faith in democracy and in the country to say, “I will trust in the electoral process to the point where, if we elect someone who sends me to war, I will go and I will fight in those missions.”

I was hired, and I took over their policy department, which does their policy advocacy and research. I just fell in love with the community of veterans and with veterans’ work. What’s fascinating about veterans’ work is that it touches on almost every issue: health care, housing, employment, domestic violence and sexual assault, children’s policies, and elementary, middle, and high school education. Then you have foreign policy thrown in as well. Veterans’ work is a microcosm that includes every policy issue.

It became a really exciting set of issues to work on, even though I had never considered veterans affairs before. One of the things that I have realized over the years is that I’ve never met a policy issue that isn’t exciting when you start to take it apart. I remember working for Senator Boxer’s office, and they asked me to look at an issue around port security in Los Angeles. I was much more interested in domestic policy and things that seemed to directly impact the lives of Americans. I agreed to do it, but I thought it would be a bit boring.

The more I investigated and explored it, I learned the scale to which our economy rests upon the movements of shipments in and out of Los Angeles, and the impact that an hour shutdown can have on our overall economy and what that means for health care, housing, employment, and education. When I learned how vulnerable those ports are—we don’t know where these ships are for months at a time until suddenly they show up on our shore, and they want to park. It was fascinating. I had a number of those experiences. The more I got to see the interconnectedness of the issues, the more I became excited and interested in a broader range of issues.

Leech: You went to IAVA and found working with veterans was actually something pretty interesting. What sorts of things did you do when you were working there?

Schleifer: Let me start with the bigger picture. We identified the essential long-term challenge as the closing window for public interest in veterans and their families. As the wars wind down and as veterans age, the country is going to want to think less and less about these two profoundly unpopular wars. Because of this closing window, there was a fierce urgency that we had to maintain in our work. We had to keep our eye on about six major issues—education, housing, mental health, and employment were the biggest ones—and later on, domestic violence and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Leech: It was important to keep people’s attention on these issues while there still was hope of doing something.

Schleifer: Exactly. We worked to keep the public’s attention on these issues in order to keep the political leaders’ attention on these issues. IAVA is a membership-based organization, so it wasn’t about me or the executive director sitting down and coming up with policies. We would do annual surveys of our membership to ask what they wanted us to be working on. The surveys got more and more complex every year. I think the longest survey was maybe over one hundred questions, quantitative and qualitative, about their policy preferences.

The remarkable thing was that we would get our members to sit there and spend the time to answer. There were an obscene number of questions, but our members were so interested in giving us their opinions that we would have incredibly high response rates and completion rates.

When I left last year, we had a larger sample of the opinions of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans than anyone else. We folded that data, along with focus groups and conversations with political leaders and other organizations that were lobbying on the same issues, into a policy agenda. That policy agenda then became the vision for what a world where veterans were truly supported would look like. From that, we would choose several priorities every year and advocate for those. We’d design discrete campaigns to advocate for issues that were, at the time, of high need and ripe for a campaign like that.

We were successful in being able to pass a major piece of legislation every year. There also were minor pieces of legislation and always being on guard for smaller potential threats.

One of the short-term issues that popped up was an issue with a bill we were pushing. This bill would have protected educational benefits for a few thousand veterans that unintentionally would have had their benefits cut. We got word that some language in the version of the bill that was about to pass was vague and might not have protected all of the vets that we intended. We found out about this on a Friday afternoon. There was going to be a vote on Monday afternoon.

Leech: How did you find out about it? How does that information come to you?

Schleifer: We had relationships within the committee. A staffer on the committee brought it to our attention, told us that the proposal was out there. A big part of the work at IAVA has always been about building and maintaining deep relationships with other organizations that did similar work, and with members of Congress and with their staffs. The relationships between a good lobbyist and the staff are of critical importance. Those staff members will turn to you for information, as well, because congressional staffers will each have dozens of issues that they’re working on, as well as needing to monitor another two or three dozen things for the member. They don’t always have the opportunity to get the depth of knowledge and understanding that they’d like. That’s certainly also true for the member of Congress who has a whole other set of responsibilities on top of that.

A good and trusted lobbyist is actually one of the most valuable sources of information in DC. One of the things that you learn very quickly is that if you confuse advocacy with information sharing, you will quickly lose your credibility. That means that if someone calls you to ask you for a piece of information because they’re writing a memo to their boss, and you spin them in that conversation, or you mislead them in that conversation in order to advocate for your position, then you are not going to get a second or third phone call from that person. They are not ever coming back to you for information, because you’ve lost your credibility.

This is something that I learned when I was a staffer. Congressman Weiner would call me and ask for advice on something. I would have to go out and get as smart on that issue as I could, as quickly as possible. That would require calling experts in academia, experts in think tanks, and lobbyists. I needed to talk to someone who had their head in that issue all the time. If anyone ever tried to spin me, or mislead me, or give me wrong information, that would be the last time I’d ever go to them.

Leech: Even just partial information that left out some important bit would be a problem.

Schleifer: Exactly. For me, what I would try to do in those conversations is to say, “Look, here are the facts as we know it. Here are my sources for those facts. This is what we think it is.” I think it’s always valuable to throw in what the other side is going to say. “If you call so-and-so, they’ll tell you this. This is why I disagree with that.” At least I’m giving them the full picture.

So at IAVA, we got a phone call from a congressional committee staffer, who basically said, “Look, we’ve got a vote Monday afternoon. This will mean the loss of thousands of your members’ educational benefits.” We’re talking about the new GI Bill, which provides almost a free ride to college for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. For many of them, that means a huge, huge change in their life—being able to go to college for free. It includes a book stipend and a housing stipend.

Leech: How would the amendment have changed things?

Schleifer: As part of the process of upgrading the New GI Bill, a segment of veterans would have inadvertently had their benefits cut, based on where they had registered for school. Almost immediately after passing those upgrades, we mobilized to get bill that would grandfather in those vets who would lose benefits. We got word on Friday that Congress was going to pass the “ grandfather clause” on Monday. Unfortunately, in the version that made it to the floor it was unclear when the grandfather protections would have started; potentially leaving the vets that we were trying to protect holding the bag for an entire semester. We needed to get that bill quickly amended, or get the VA to implement the law at the right time. We quickly organized a war room over the weekend. Members of the policy team, members of our communications team, members of a membership team all got together and designed a rapid response. We started talking to the press about it, to raise the issue publicly. We started talking to our own members, to educate them as to what was going on, so that they could be valuable advocates for themselves. We also started making phone calls to leadership staff and committee member staff, making sure that everyone knew that we were not going to let this happen without a fight.

We needed to create a situation where it would become more politically painful for them to pass this piece of legislation with its flaws than it would be for them to fix it. That meant trying to bring as much public attention to the issue as possible, as quickly as possible, all in forty-eight hours. That included building an online component with Facebook and Twitter. We created an e-mail petition. That was one of our most successful e-mail petitions, where we had our members e-mail the highest-ranking person in the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee and that staffer.

The e-mails flooded that staffer’s inbox. She made a phone call asking me to turn it off, because she couldn’t get any work done. We hadn’t disclosed her actual e-mail address. There was a nifty little workaround that allowed us to control the flood of mail. The committee ended up postponing the vote. They postponed it a couple of times. In the end, rather than amending the bill, the VA corrected the problem internally so that we could get the bill passed and it would protect all the veterans it was originally intended to protect. Without our swift action, Congress would have just passed the flawed bill and called it a day.

Leech: One of the other interesting things you did while you were at IAVA was your annual fly-in day for veterans. How did that work?

Schleifer: We would have what we called Storm the Hill, which was an annual event. Veterans would apply to participate. There was a written application and a Skype interview as well, so we could see how they presented themselves. Then we would handpick about twenty veterans and fly them to DC, where we would have two days of training in lobbying, in media, and in the issues that were part of IAVA’s agenda. We wanted them to become thoughtful communicators, especially in storytelling, since that is such a huge part of really good advocacy work. How can a veteran tell his or her story in thirty seconds if it’s a short elevator ride, sixty seconds if it’s a long elevator ride, and five minutes if it’s a sit-down meeting? How can they tell their story and their friends’ stories in a way that makes it appealing to a congressional staffer or the member of Congress?

We would do two days of intensive training and then spend the next three or four days storming the Hill, having meeting, after meeting, after meeting that we would preschedule. We would identify the most important offices to be in and target those offices. Our office would work for two months beforehand, scheduling meetings. The meetings were in both the House and Senate with the Veterans’ Affairs committee members and leadership on both sides of the aisle. We came up with this incredible spreadsheet that had them going to eight meetings a day. They would go in groups of three or four, so in the course of three days, we’d have one hundred and twenty meetings on Capitol Hill.

There are two ways of doing these Hill trips. Some organizations will do the shotgun approach. They’ll bus in thousands of their members from around the country, all wearing the same T-shirt, all wearing the same hat, just knocking on doors and trying to get meetings, and putting down written materials in each office. Our approach was much more strategic and targeted. We would choose the offices. We would choose the people. We would have an extensive training. And then we would make sure that they all were talking about the same things, in a similar way.

Because I wasn’t a veteran, I didn’t do a lot of the direct advocacy work. We had veterans on staff, and I was a registered lobbyist, because I did lobby, but I tend to lobby only on certain issues, and with certain people. The day-to-day lobbying was run by a veteran, because in the end, you can best advocate if you’re advocating for yourself, if you’re telling your own story. You have a level of credibility with your audience that an outsider wouldn’t have.

We needed people who could go into a congressional office and say, “When I served, this was my experience, and when I came back, this was my experience. Therefore, I understand the urgency and the need for my brothers and sisters in arms, and therefore this policy is a good idea and will help people who are like me.” As someone who didn’t wear the uniform, I just couldn’t make that same case. I would be telling other people’s stories. As much as I cherish those stories, and value those stories, and respect those stories, they were never my own.

Leech: So instead, you were more involved in strategy and planning of advocacy?

Schleifer: Exactly. I also would go into meetings where there was less interest in stories and personal experiences and more interested in getting down to the policy details.

Leech: It sounds like in Storm the Hill, you did not focus on making sure veterans were connected with their own members of Congress, but rather you focused on members of Congress in key positions of leadership and on key committees.

Schleifer: Exactly. Whenever we’d call to set up a meeting, they would also ask us, “Is there a constituent coming?” I think, at most, we had twenty-four people. With only two dozen people coming through, there’s no way we could hit most constituencies, especially on the House side. It just wasn’t a priority. We would try to have geographic diversity, as well as in terms of gender and race, but we were not trying to put a constituent in every office.

Leech: How long were you at IAVA?

Schleifer: A little bit more than three years.

Leech: What brought you then to Educators 4 Excellence?

Schleifer: As I described, I was never telling my own story at IAVA. I get sentimental when I talk about that work. My closest friends are the men and women who I worked with there. They flew around the world to Australia to come to my wedding and to roast me the night before. The bonds formed doing this type of advocacy work are strong because the stakes are so high. Protecting veterans’ educational benefits can mean all the difference in a successful transition to civilian life. Being a part of passing the new GI Bill 2.0 that extended educational benefits to four hundred thousand veterans was one of the greatest things I have ever been a part of. Advocating for the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was a great point of pride.

But in thinking about where I wanted to be, I was telling other people’s stories. My passion had always been education, and I wanted to get back to my students and their community. I wanted to do similar work, building advocacy campaigns and getting the right laws and policies passed that would be transformative. Educators 4 Excellence was founded by teachers who had a similar classroom experience as I did. They loved teaching, but felt shackled by a system that didn’t listen to their voices. They started an organization that in many ways mirrors IAVA, in that it’s teacher-led. Teachers define the policies, not the professional staff. We advocate for issues of importance to our members. We involve our members in writing the policy reports and in leading the advocacy campaigns. They are the voices at the rallies and at our events.

While I was still at IAVA, I had a fellowship through Leaders for Educational Equity, which is a sister nonprofit to Teach for America. Its mission is to get former Teach for America alums involved in public policy and in the political world. One of the political leadership fellows I met worked at Educators 4 Excellence. He insisted I meet the founders. I had lunch with them, and at that lunch I was certain that I wanted to be a part of that organization. Their theory of change was so spot-on.

Leech: Now that you are at E4E, what do you do? Are you advocating at the state and local level only, or also in DC?

Schleifer: I came in as the Executive Director of the New York chapter. The two founders started E4E in New York, and now they’re expanding it nationally, after teachers from across the country reached out. I came in with a focus on growing the New York team, growing the membership in New York, and growing our impact and building our relationships at the local level. Education policy is very local – it lives mostly at the state and district level – and so we focus our efforts on getting our teachers’ voices heard in those arenas.

Leech: Today, even though you are still a policy advocate, you are no longer officially a lobbyist, at least under the law. How is what you do now different from what you did before, and how is it the same?

Schleifer: It’s different in that I’m not spending a good part of my time preparing for and directly addressing elected officials. That aligns with the legal definition. E4E is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and we work to educate and inform the broader public conversation about education policy by ensuring teachers’ voices and ideas are heard. The things that are the same ... A lot of the work that I did as a lobbyist-advocate was about being part of a community—understanding what that community wants and needs in order to realize its vision. For the veterans, that was a healthy transition back into civilian life. For teachers, it’s elevating the profession and better serving their students, and figuring out what the best policies are to help them achieve both of those goals. That’s consistent. In both jobs it was important to find ways to make the issues relevant to the general public, so that the issues also become relevant and significant to elected officials.

In both cases, it’s about building coalitions so that we have strength in numbers. It’s about working deeply with the community, not just to understand them, but to help grow a movement so that we can rely upon collective action to influence policy makers and stakeholders at the city and state level when we need something for that community, when we have a specific ask. It’s about making sure that I have a team that is excited and trained to do all those things as well. It takes a community of people to realize the goal of executing on these effective, strategic priorities.

Leech: It’s helpful to see the parallels that exist between working in a political office, working as a lobbyist, and working in advocacy more generally. There are many similarities throughout the work.

Schleifer: I think I learned to be the advocate in the classroom. I learned so many great political skills as a teacher. Everything from the confidence that’s required to stand in front of a room of thirty kids and communicate effectively, to the ability to break down complex ideas and issues in a way that’s accessible to them, that understands where they are. I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when they communicate is they don’t understand their audience.

To be an effective teacher, you have to know where each and every one of your students are, in terms of what they know and don’t know, and what their emotional states are that day. When a student walks in and he has his arms crossed and is grumpy because he hasn’t had breakfast, that’s going to be a very different day and interaction than it will be for the student who did have a full breakfast and is in a really good mood. Like a good teacher, a successful politician or lobbyist advocates knows how to communicate to many people, meeting them where they are.

Leech: Why don’t you pick one of the issues that you have recently worked on and walk me through how you and E4E have approached that issue.

Schleifer: The teachers’ union and the City of New York are negotiating a teacher evaluation system. Over a year ago, to win federal Race to the Top funding, the legislature and the governor required that every district in New York have a teacher evaluation system in place by January 17, 2013. Any district that didn’t have this evaluation in place by that date would lose a portion of state aid. In New York City, that translates to about $300 million.

Leech: That’s some serious money.

Schleifer: Yes, it’s serious money. And beyond that, the issue itself is important. One of the early issues that E4E’s teachers focused on was teacher evaluation. We believe that the only way a person can become exceptional at anything is to get consistent feedback and support. E4E’s teachers created a policy team, which is how we develop our policy papers. We get a group of teachers together and investigate the issue. The group comes up with policy recommendations and writes a paper. Our teachers came together, and they wrote up a recommended teacher evaluation report.

Our concern was that there’s a long history of finger-pointing and contention between the union, and the mayor, and the city Department of Education. We were concerned that they wouldn’t commit themselves to fully negotiating and the school district would lose both the money and the opportunity to get meaningful feedback and support for our teachers.

Over the last couple of months, we studied the issues again with our members. We had panel discussions, focus groups, and roundtables so that more of our teachers got involved in the issue. Our teachers drafted op-eds, which we helped place in the media. Education Chancellor Dennis Walcott came to speak to about one hundred and sixty of our members.

Just before New Year’s Eve, we shot a series of videos of teachers sharing their greatest challenges from 2012, and their resolutions for 2013, and then communicating how a meaningful teacher evaluation was necessary for them to realize their resolutions for 2013.

As we were coming into the last couple weeks of the negotiations, especially over the holiday break, we started rolling these videos out. In the worst of it, right before and immediately following the Christmas to New Year’s week, the mayor and the president of the teacher’s union were throwing punches at each other constantly. These videos started rolling out and created the third voice in the debate, which was the voice of teachers saying, “We want an evaluation. We don’t want the bickering. We don’t want the fighting. We want an evaluation system so we can get the feedback and support we need to become exceptional.”

Leech: How were these videos being delivered?

Schleifer: Through social media. And then we knew that if we got an interesting product out there, we wouldn’t have to pay to get airtime. The media would pick up on it. The Daily News ran one of the videos on its online site. Capital New York wrote about it, and so did a lot of blogs. Capital New York described it as “politically smart,” because we were providing the voice of teachers and making it very clear to the public.

Unfortunately, the city and union failed to come to an agreement by the January 17 deadline and the state is going to take back $300 million in school funding from the city budget. Our teachers refused to stop there. Our city schools can’t do without that money. And if the city doesn’t have an evaluation agreement by this coming September we’ll lose even more funding. Teachers want meaningful feedback to improve their teaching. Evaluation is a critical component of elevating the profession of teaching so that teachers can deliver to their students an education worthy of them.

We shifted our focus to Albany and called on Governor Cuomo to get involved. Returning to an idea we had floated over a year ago, our teachers called on him to establish a “backstop evaluation” – a default that would kick in if the city and union continued to fail to reach a deal. We had a two-prong approach: a grassroots petition and a TV ad buy. We collected over 2,000 signatures and aired a TV ad featuring three of our teachers calling on Albany to step in. Within days Governor Cuomo announced an amendment to the budget that would establish this backstop, written by the Commissioner of Education in New York State. Come September teachers will have an evaluation and hopefully it’ll provide them the support and feedback want.

Leech: The teachers can, in turn, also talk to their unions, I’m assuming?

Schleifer: Yes, absolutely. That’s certainly part of it. We encourage our members to be active leaders within their schools and the union.

Leech: Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about what it’s like to be a policy advocate or a lobbyist from a personal perspective. Is it a good job to have in terms of work, life, and family balance?

Schleifer: I would say yes, in that it’s such fulfilling work. When you’re advocating for something, or when you’re lobbying for something that you know is going to affect people’s lives for the better, and you start to see even small victories affect people’s lives for the better, then you go home feeling fulfilled. I think that’s something that translates wonderfully to having a healthy work/life balance. You go home tired. I’m exhausted. You’re fulfilled at the same time, which I think is wonderful. It’s one of the things that I liked most about being in DC. Everyone there is doing something for a cause, usually for a cause that they believe in, to realize a vision of some sort. Most people there are passionate and excited about the work that they do.

It’s never the same thing from one day to the next, so it’s a great space for people who like to always be thinking on their feet and like a dynamic, unpredictable environment. I also think you have to like people, in terms of wanting to help them, if you’re an advocate for a constituency. Liking people is also important because an advocate is constantly communicating. Whether it’s through e-mail, or the phone, or meetings, an advocate is constantly talking to people. To do that, you have to be honestly interested in who they are, how they’ve come to be where they are, what they think, and what they believe. Strategically, it’ll make you a better communicator, and, practically, if you don’t, you’ll burn out. You have to thrive on the interactions with other people, because you’ll be having them all the time.

I think advocates also have to be confident enough in what they’re fighting for that they can keep asking for things. You have to be strategic enough and thoughtful enough to be sure you’re building your relationships carefully and thoughtfully, and thinking through the way you speak and communicate with people. Relationships are your currency. They’re the opportunity for being able to do what you want to do for the constituencies that you’re serving.

Leech: In what you’ve just said, there’s implicit advice for people who might want to go into public advocacy as a career. But more directly, what advice would you have for them in terms of getting in the door?

Schleifer: The earlier you can start, the better. There is a trajectory of experiences that advocates tend to have. There will be an internship, and then there will be an entry-level position. Throughout that, advocates-to-be should always be looking for mentors, people who will recognize their passion, capacity, and intellect, and who will recognize the value of those new advocates to the movement or the cause. A mentor will want to invest in that potential to help those new advocates get the next position.

Building a network is important but that network should be built thoughtfully, in a way that leads to meaningful relationships with people, where they can count on you and you can count on them. It’s helpful to build a broad network so that you can be fluid as opportunities arise. It also is valuable to work on a campaign. Campaign workers develop very robust skill sets and have their mettles tested as they work insane hours for nine months straight, seven days a week, with the principle goal of getting one person, one decision maker, elected to office.

Learning some of this through the academic route was really valuable for me—especially my economic and statistical training, and even some of the soft skills like negotiation. Getting those through a university degree can be valuable, but you don’t have to go that route.

Leech: You don’t have to have a master’s degree in public policy to be an advocate?

Schleifer: No, you don’t. I don’t think there is one right answer, one singular path into advocacy work. I found my master’s degree incredibly valuable because it allowed me to go from my experience teaching into policy and politics, filling in many gaps. The real-life exposure and experience with the communities, and the people, and the issues that you’re going to be advocating for grounds you in their reality. A person also certainly could go straight from college and build a career in advocacy, especially with the right mentorship.