S You hear a lot about in education circles these days, so much so that it has become a buzzword, a cliche'. But there are two things worth remembering about cliche's, this one included. First, the human capacity for self-deception is limitless, and we all tend to fool ourselves into believing that words, like smoke, are a signal that something much more serious is going on. But a cliche' does not a substantive program make. The second point is the flip side of the first. The fact that an expression has sprung to many lips may well be a clear sign that it has departed people's minds and hearts. The repetition of a once powerful idea leads inevitably to over-familiarity; pretty soon no one is paying any attention. If either of these dynamics is part of the notion of teacher empowerment these days, there is real cause for concern, and perhaps the time has for some refocusing. My own observation is that the root of the trouble may be that too much of the discussion about empowerment proceeds mostly along one, very narrow axis: Those interested in empowerment tend to talk along a continuum limited to strategies for redirecting the political and administrative traffic flow from top-down to bottom-up, the clear implication that teachers are at the bottom and the avowed purpose is moving them closer to the top. Another Axis. But suppose we laid out the issue of empowerment for teachers along another axis, not up and down but from the center out? In this way of looking at it, the concern is not primarily the teacher's climb up or down the power ladder (I recognize there are real issues here that cannot be ignored), but the teacher/child relationship as a kind of center of gravity, around which the resources and interactions of a healthy educational system revolve, like the planets about a sun. Thus, the closer to the child, the greater the field of force and the more power there is for rearranging the surrounding planets---things like particular teachers, various specialists, principals, other administrators, and superintendents. This way of looking at empowerment would help peel off the layers of cliche'd rhetoric and restore to the Another empowerment proposal is to begin work at reversing the recent direction of many school systems of adding administrators to up with, and then oversee, solutions to the problem of how to get closer to the Over time, as in all bureaucracies, the new layers become self-preoccupied, i.e., come Up with is gradually replaced by oversee. Inevitably, a new administrative layer has to be added to build bridges back to the teachers once again. In some of my more lucid moments, I am led to the insight that about three-quarters of this is unnecessary, as are approximately the same number of the jobs in educational administration. Building an education system from the child out puts a lot of things in proper perspective very quickly. A third proposal has to do improving professional development as a vehicle for teacher empowerment. There needs to be a two-year, across-the-board minimum requirement of ongoing professional development and classroom management training for all entry-level teachers. Such an effort need not exclude teachers who lack the time and resources, for travel; it can take place at the local or state level, such as the CFC training offered through chapters or federations. Professional development should also acquire some new focuses, such as immediate involvement in strategies for at-risk children and preventive stress management instead of the rear-guard actions against burnout that have to preoccupy so many school districts. Finally, a from-the-child-out perspective on empowerment can also serve as the basis for completely rethinking the way salary scales are structured. From the paraprofessional to the district superintendent, today's salary structures are a strong disincentive to improved instruction and the more effective use of limited public resources. …