Teachers often feel helpless when trying to reform their own schools, but they may not be as powerless as they think. That’s the message that Rick Hess, the Director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, tries to empower teachers with in his book, The Cage-Busting Teacher.

Cage-busting isn’t when teachers meet with policymakers or sit on a new committee, Hess said at an book event on Wednesday. “It’s cage-busting when teachers identify the things that stop them from doing their best work, come up with better solutions that they can share with colleagues, or administrators or policymakers, and find constructive ways to push those solutions so that they have more time, passion and energy to do the stuff that they’re in the classroom to do.”