To find out why, Alexandra Robbins embedded herself with three teachers for a year and interviewed hundreds more to write The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession.
PC: Antony Trivet
Low teacher pay is the elephant in the room that everyone sees. For every $1 paid to their college-educated peers, teachers choose a profession that pays them only 75 cents on average.
PC: pixabay
These low salaries have created a teacher “shortage", which isn't a shortage of people but of jobs that pay well enough for qualified people to want.
What the elephant hides is that the remaining fewer teachers have to teach more classes during the school day, which leads to more work after-hours. Even so, 7 in 10 teachers have taken a second job to make ends meet.
PC: Mathias Reding
So when summer rolls around, many teachers give up relaxing days for things like:
All of the above? Seems likely, doesn't it?
While formal work tackles policy change and government reform, in the meantime how about some options for individual action, such as:
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“Have you heard?” is our way of sharing another point of view on commonly held beliefs. Through this we hope to encourage curiosity, dialogue, and tolerance of diverse ideas.
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