Pennsylvania educator Ashlie Crosson named National Teacher of the Year

Ashlie Crosson, a Pennsylvania educator who was named the National Teacher of the Year on April 29, didn’t have plans to pursue teaching when she first went away to college. 

That, however, quickly changed.

“I am a first-generation college student, and when I went to college, I had not planned to become a teacher,” Crosson told the Pennsylvania Independent. “But I quickly realized that I would have none of my success if it wasn’t for the teachers in my life who invested their time and energy into me far beyond what is required of the job, and that it changed my life. And if I could do that for one other student, what was done for me, then that’s what I wanted to do.”

For the past 14 years, Crosson has striven to do just that: make a difference in her students’ lives. Now, the Mifflin County native, who teaches English at Mifflin County High School in Lewistown, a rural community in central Pennsylvania, will have a chance to make a difference in the lives of teachers and students across the country. 

Each year, the Council of Chief State School Officers selects a National Teacher of the Year from a group of 50 educators who each have been named as their state’s teacher of the year. That individual then goes on to take a year-long sabbatical from their job in order to work full time to “shine a light on the vital role of teachers in this country” and “bring national public attention on the importance of excellence in teaching,” according to a statement from the Council. 

Crosson will be traveling the country to speak with fellow teachers and with students, amplify the issues educators face, and inspire others to join her profession at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is dismantling the federal Department of Education and aims to slash funding for public education. His fellow Republican elected officials have carried out ongoing attacks on public education amid a statewide and nationwide teacher shortage.

Crosson hopes to use her new platform to generate national conversation about the challenges facing rural educators and students, as well as to change what she sees as an increasingly politicized educational landscape in the country. 

“I think one of the biggest challenges is just that rural communities are easy to overlook,” Crosson said. “It’s easy for the legislature to overlook them because that’s not where the density of your votes come from. It’s easy for new teaching candidates to overlook them because it’s not where you hear about the highest needs for good-quality teachers. And so, for rural communities, it’s really just like, can we get our voice heard? Can we amplify ourselves and uplift and empower our towns and our communities so that people know how wonderful they are? 

“And that’s the best part of all of this, that I now have this opportunity to do that, literally, on this national scale, and that my town kind of gets to have that spot to represent and to be sort of a face for rural education across the country,” Crosson continued.

It’s not just rural educators and students Crosson wants to empower, she explained: She wants teachers, students and everyone involved in education to be respected across the country. 

Trump, Republican lawmakers and right-wing advocates have for years attacked public education, which has led to an increasingly politicized educational landscape in which Democratic voters are far more likely to support public schools and teachers than their Republican counterparts. For years, Republicans have worked to cut funding for public education, push school vouchers, and ban books that mention racism or LGBTQIA+ people.

Crosson hopes that people can focus on community-level conversations about what is happening in their schools as opposed to the more politicized national discourse about education.

“I think that we struggle with perception and with the way that our profession can be turned into a political talking point, or something like that,” Crosson said. “I think the best thing that we can do is turn inward. Talk to your educators, look at the school system within your community because that’s where you can create positive momentum. That’s where you can create change. That’s where you can have conversations that actually develop a better system for teachers, a better system for students, a better system for families.”

Bringing the world to her students

As part of her work as the Teacher of the Year, Crosson will share her own success stories with other teachers and gain insight from educators across the country. 

That will give her a chance to highlight the efforts she’s made to bring the world to her students — and to bring her students to the world, she says. After returning to teach in her home community five years ago, Crosson began teaching about global humanitarian crises in a class called Survival Stories, and revived her school’s journalism program, which produces the school’s newspaper and the school district magazine. Prior to teaching at Mifflin, she taught at Bellefonte Area School District in Centre County and in Sussex County in Delaware.

Mifflin County may be rural, but that doesn’t mean that her students are cut off from the world, Crosson emphasized. 

“I wanted to work with the idea that we can talk about what’s going on in the world and we can bring in these contemporary issues that our planet is trying to solve and work through from a youth perspective,” Crosson said of her Survival Stories class. “So a way to talk about very real-world, global citizenship-level topics and skills, but in a way that’s age appropriate. Every text that we work with is from a youth perspective, and they are from all over the world, from Asia to the Middle East to the border of Texas.”

Crosson also launched the MC Goes Global program, a study abroad initiative that this year will bring Mifflin students to Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and Scotland. The program is inspired by the study abroad program that Crosson participated in as a high school student in Mifflin County. Through that program, Crosson spent 17 days traveling in Germany, Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria, and England.

“It changed my life because it was the first time I was on a plane,” Crosson said. “It was the first time I was in a foreign country. It was the first time that I was interacting with people who were so wholly different than me and seeing centuries of history and culture throughout the world.” 

Once she returned to teach in Mifflin County, she went to her superintendent and school board to talk about launching a similar program. 

“If we can help students have real-world, accessible opportunities and cultural opportunities, but also just learning how to navigate through the world, then that’s going to be the best learning experience that I could possibly give them, because that’s going to help them be more comfortable going into the world that we live in,” Crosson said.