The U.S. has categorically failed its K-12 teachers, and thus itself
For most of my childhood, my mom was a primary school teacher. She taught second grade for several years while we lived in Eastern Oregon in a rural Ontario, just outside Boise, Idaho. It was a diverse community, with Japanese immigrants who had been interned, Basque immigrants who had been sheep herders, Mexican immigrants supporting farms, and of course White farmers and ranchers. She had my brother and I, and had a bad bout of tinnitus and Bell’s Palsy; she asked for unpaid leave to recover, and her principal threatened to fire her if she didn’t show up the next fall.
When we moved to Portland, and then a suburb of Portland, she worked as a secretary for a few years, then found a job as a 5th grade teacher in rural St. Helens, Oregon. Most of my early experiences about her teaching were defined by her leaving early for her 45 mile drive to her rural school north of Portland, coming back late, sometimes after my brother and I had made dinner, and then getting ready for bed while she stayed up to grade papers and prepare lessons for her next day. On weekends, sometimes she’d show us her plans, telling us about her creative schemes to connect 10 year olds—who were mostly interested in fart jokes and jump ropes—with science, English , social studies, and math. Summer started in July and ended in July, with unpaid meetings throughout June and August.
When I was a bit older, I’d go to school with her, sometimes a week or two before the school year started to help her set up her room. When I was in 4th, 5th, and 6th grade, sometimes I’d even join her class for the first few days of school before our district started, acting as her assistant, and watching her teach, facilitate, and manage the classroom. I noticed so many things: the way she seemed to effortlessly monitor the attention of 35 children; the way they paid such close attention to her direction and questions; the way that just a few children would consume an outsized proportion of her attention; how she used both the classroom space and the hallways to orchestrate the social contexts she needed to personalize learning. I watched her in ways I didn’t watch my own teachers, seeing how her parenting overlapped with her teaching, and how it didn’t. These annual trips to her school became an ever present reminder of why she was so busy with work at home: there was not a moment at school to think, reflect, assess, or plan; all of that had to happen nights and weekends. I didn’t understand how her job was possible, but I did understand, despite my deep curiosity about teaching, that I didn’t want it for myself.
Things worsened in 1990, when anti-tax Oregon activists got measure 5 on the ballot, proposing to cut property taxes by a third. The public, oblivious to the consequences of the tax cut, won by a few points. It cut $41 billion from the state budget. Since property taxes were a primary source of tax revenue for Oregon public schools, it also meant a massive cut in public education. After the measure passed, I remember each June, because my Mom would often come home uncertain if her contract would be renewed, because it dependent on the state budget. Her life as a teacher, and therefore our life at home, became contingent on the public’s commitment to educating every child, weighed against wealthy home owners’ greed. As a teen, the message was clear: learning isn’t important, teachers aren’t important, and schools aren’t important. What’s important is rich people staying as rich as possible.
Our wealthy and nearly exclusively White suburb managed. Rich parents pulled together and kept sports and music intact for a while, before they were eventually cut. My school just barely managed to retain its excellent teachers; many of them had Ph.D.’s, some of them had won the U.S. presidential award for excellence in teaching. They inspired me in math, science, and even computing, even though we had no computer science classes or teachers at the time. But after cuts got deep enough, they eventually left for the security of private schools, or retired out of disgust for the gutting of school budgets. I constantly compared what was happening in my school—a slashed budget, barely bolstered by upper middle class parent donations—to what was happening in my Mom’s much poorer rural school—layoffs, canceled sports, and closed schools. At some point, I found out that teacher salaries were public, and found that my most beloved calculus teacher had maxed out her salary at $36,000, with a Master’s degree and 20 years of experience. My mom, without a masters, but the same amount of experience, made less than $30,000. I didn’t understand why people who are so incredible at their jobs, who had so inspired me, could be so undervalued and so overworked.
The story of Oregon’s abandonment of public education continues to happen across public schools in the United States: teachers are taken for granted, their salaries are kept low, their teaching load kept high, and if they ever decide to resist this increasing pressure through unions, they are publicly shamed as selfish and greedy. Imagine being someone who has earned a college degree, and perhaps a graduate degree, being told that getting paid less than all other professionals, working all summer without pay, working all school year 60 hours a week, teaching in crumbling schools with diminished resources, is good enough for teachers and children. I describe these conditions to my friends and colleagues in more countries in Europe and Asia, and they respond with the simplest questions: How do children learn? Why would anyone be a teacher? Why are American K-12 schools so neglected, but American universities so revered? I have no answers for them.
Now, imagine being a teacher, entering an profession with these conditions and this history of neglect, and then facing this pandemic. There was already no money or time to run school as it was. Everyone was already at their limit of stress, with little ability to make meaningful change, and little hope of a livable salary. Perhaps the only thing keeping teachers in school is a love of the work and a devotion to children. And then, the public says: completely change how you teach in a week; do it again every three weeks at the whims of public and political opinion; endanger yourself and your family so we can get back to work; do all this with no money, time, support, respect, or dignity; and don’t you dare ask for more, because your love of teaching our children should be enough. But a passion for teaching doesn’t feed your family, nor does it protect them from this virus. Our children’s right to education is not a right to abuse, neglect, disrespect, or demoralize teachers.
I don’t think the public really understands how much of a tipping point COVID-19 has been for K-12 teachers. It’s not just a year of burnout; it’s a culmination of decades of disregard, not only for teachers, but for children as well. At the end of this year, I fully expect a massive number of teachers to leave the profession, worsening the attrition that public school systems already face. And I will not blame them. It was already a system that was so demoralizing in its lack of resources that schools lose up to 10% of their teachers a year. And teacher education programs are seeing declining applications from aspiring teachers. The 2021–22 academic year could be a year defined by higher workloads than ever for the teachers who remain, larger class sizes than ever, gutted state budgets that will be unable to fund any remedies, and a hands-off federal system, paralyzed by conservative disinterest in public institutions, that refuses to make public education a sustainable, valued profession.
As someone who is just starting to work in teacher education, I wish I could be optimistic to youth who aspire to teach. I want to tell inspired undergrads how enriching and rewarding a teacher can be, and how their values and expertise will be cherished and rewarded. But all I can say is that they are needed; the rest of the story is one of scarcity, stress, disrespect, and disregard, in all but the wealthiest public and private schools.
Of course, the answer to all of this isn’t really that complicated. Across Europe and Asia, teachers are well-trained, well-paid, and broadly respected and valued for their expertise. School budgets are comparatively stable because the public understands that there will be no country if only the wealthiest children in its future generations are confident, skilled, and wise. The United States has hobbled along despite these disinvestments in education by just giving up on schools, and instead importing well-educated people from these other nations, letting private schools teach the rich kids, and celebrating the few students that succeed despite disinvestment. Except I’m not so sure most of our country wants those immigrants anymore. And after this last administration, this pandemic, and our political divide, I’m not so sure those immigrants want to come. And with income inequality at record levels, it’s harder than ever to escape poverty and its punishing impacts. What the United States will be left with is its fundamentally broken network of a hundred thousand schools, each crumbling in its own way, with little ability to fix it for lack of public willingness to boldly declare: teachers matter because our children matter because our future matters — and we’re willing to pay for that future.
What would that future look like? In the short term during this pandemic it would mean every child having access to broadband and a computer. Every working family having free child care and funded parental leave. Twice as many teachers, each paid twice as much, so students can get the attention they deserve to inspire them to understand themselves and the world. Policies that center teachers’ safety and well-being over profits and politics. New buildings that have flexible indoor and outdoor spaces for rich and varied learning experiences.
And longer term, it would mean a nationwide reinvestment in public education at all levels, inspiring new teachers to join the profession, paying teachers at levels that allow them to stay, teaching loads that allow them to adequately prepare while also still having a life. People would come from all over the world to visit our innovative buildings, meet our rock star teachers, and marvel at thriving, clever, and creative youth. Public education, not Silicon Valley or Wall Street, would be our greatest and most visible achievement, and the envy of the world.
The United States is quite far from ever achieving such greatness. And yet, at this pivotal moment in U.S. history, we’ve never been closer. Organize your communities, call your legislators, and pass the laws that help us put education before everything else. Because if we don’t, we’ll have no future left to fight for.
