Students are beginning a new school year all over the United States, summer now just a memory of days gone by.

Teachers may have dreamt of empty calendars and lazy days at the beach, but for many, last summer meant … work.

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.

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.

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.

So when summer rolls around, many teachers give up relaxing days for things like:

• getting even more qualified in hopes of higher pay, by going to grad school or earning more certifications, which they have no time to do during the school year
• making up earnings by teaching summer school, tutoring, or working seasonal jobs
• re-creating lesson plans for the entire year ahead because curricula, content, projects, assignments, and testing constantly change and teachers are expected to keep up on their own time

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:

• be a supportive parent for teachers, publicly and privately, respectfully and emotionally, online and in-person, voluntarily or financially where you can
• buy classroom supplies for teachers  through their wish lists at ClearTheList or DonorsChoose
• support small businesses on Karmalize like Kind Cotton, A Perfect Blend, The Book Bus and more that stand for education!

Know more businesses like these? Suggest them to us here.

“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.