How Gender Bias Affects Teachers’ Salaries
By Casey Quinlan
Jennifer Orr, who teaches kindergarten for the Fairfax County Public School system in Virginia, has grown accustomed to people not taking her profession seriously. “You’ll say, ‘I teach kindergarteners,’ and they say, ‘That’s so cute,’” she says. “You get that sense of, ‘Oh, you think I play all day.”
Orr’s experience is hardly unique. Parents may respect their children’s teachers, but too often, people perceive teachers as a step up above babysitters, especially in the earlier grades. More troublingly still, this perception seems to hold true among the policymakers who could engender real change.
The conversation surrounding how to make the teaching profession more respected has recently been reinvigorated thanks to initiatives coming from Washington, D.C. The U.S. Department of Education’s proposed 2017 budget provides for $1 billion in funding for a grant competition, called the Best Job in the World, as a way to attract talented teachers to work at high-needs schools. The Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank, also launched the TeachStrong campaign last fall, to build a coalition of 40 education organizations that will discuss how to make the teaching profession more prestigious, as well as how to provide better support systems for teachers.
