Skip to Main Content

Priorities

  • Education Clearing pathways to a meaningful education
  • Environmental Justice Strengthening the symbiosis between humanity and nature
  • Health Accelerating cancer research and empowering patients
  • Immigration Helping aspiring Americans and new immigrants succeed
  • Media & Journalism Provoking thought and strengthening democracy
  • Social Justice Elevating leaders and models at the forefront of change
  • Bloomhouse Co-creating a thriving East Palo Alto with the community
  • Chicago CRED Creating real economic destiny in Chicago
  • E Pluribus Unum Building a more just, equitable, and inclusive South
  • XQ: The Super School Project Rethinking America's high schools

About Emerson

  • About Us A letter from Laurene Powell Jobs
  • Our Team
  • Our Fellowships Amplifying extraordinary voices
  • Stay Informed

Share this page

  • facebook
  • twitter
  • linkedin

What It Means to Be A Teacher in 2018

Education

Posted May 2018

Teacher Appreciation Week is an aspiration week. Beth Schmidt, a former teacher, nonprofit founder, and Emerson Collective's Education Portfolio Director, explains that expectations of our teachers have changed. In order to truly appreciate teachers in America, we must elevate the teaching profession and recognize its value.

Jessica Lander is a high school teacher in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she teaches 153 students—many of them immigrants—who speak more than 40 languages. To educate students on the power of civic engagement in America, she introduced a curriculum called Generation Citizen. Students unanimously chose gun violence as their community’s greatest crisis, then researched the issue, read articles, and interviewed local leaders. After concluding that their community should run a gun buy-back program, they presented their case to the head of the Lowell Police Department, who signed on. Jessica’s class wrote letters, created a social media campaign, translated posters into different languages, reached out to newspapers, went on local radio shows, and wrote op-eds to get the community involved. After two and a half months, 38 guns were turned in, and Jessica’s class has become “hooked” on the power of being civically engaged.

In Los Angeles, California, Alisha Mernick, a high school teacher within the DonorsChoose.org network, responded to the dire need for a more positive school climate. To address bullying, she created a project for her students to encounter and discuss the ways in which culture reinforces stereotypes and expectations around gender roles, sexuality, race, beauty, and societal values. Through media analysis, she asked students to appropriate familiar images and create artwork remixing those images to communicate a critical message about the values and expectations of American culture that often result in bullying.

In addition to teaching Steinbeck and subtraction, our teachers are tasked with molding our nation’s young people into model citizens by addressing critical issues of our time—gun violence, bullying, and racism. Teachers address these tasks with grace, urgency and even love. They innovate in their classrooms to engage and reach all students, inspiring and encouraging the promise of change. They refuse to allow students to harden to their own potential, offering acceptance and empathy in the midst of a nation who will not.

In this photo, Marissa Molina teaches Spanish at the Denver School of Science and Technology.

Yet, the teaching profession is deeply undervalued for the critical role teachers play in our society. We do not provide teachers with the tools and support—reimagined school structures, professional development, and compensation—that they need.

The physical design and space of the American classroom has not changed since 1905 when teachers were training students to work in factories during the Industrial Revolution. American teachers still stand in front of overcrowded classrooms meeting the Carnegie Unit standard, defined as 120 hours of contact time with students, or one hour of instruction on a subject per day, five days a week, for 24 weeks per year.

Teacher training has also remained stagnant. According to the National Council on Teacher Quality’s 2018 Teacher Prep Review, only about six percent of traditional graduate programs earn a grade of A, “signifying that they make an effort to match their student teachers with strong mentor teachers and that they provide an acceptable frequency of observation and feedback to their candidates.”

Perhaps most importantly, perception of the American teacher has also not budged. America – a country that prides itself on innovation, cutting-edge skillsets and opportunity for all – does not value the leaders who disseminate the knowledge to our nation’s brain trust to reach those goals. The value of our nation’s teachers is reflected in the way we compensate them. Just last week, teachers across Arizona walked out of their classrooms to protest their low salaries, which are more than $10,000 below the national average of $59,000 per year. Teachers in Colorado followed suit.

Despite all of this stagnation, the role, responsibilities, and expectations of our nation’s teachers have been elevated. At this moment, the stakes are high for the future potential of our country, and it is indeed, teachers themselves who are the first responders to champion change within their outdated classroom walls.

Last week Mandy Manning, a teacher in Spokane, Washington, was awarded National Teacher of the Year. Manning, who teaches English to newly arrived immigrants and refugees from countries such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Myanmar, Mexico and Tanzania, embraced the moment by handing President Trump a stack of letters from her refugee students. The letters described how “people in power, particularly the president, should be very careful about how he or anybody else in power communicates about our immigrant refugees and, frankly, any group of people.”

Today in America, Teacher Appreciation Week is an aspirational week. In order to truly appreciate the teaching profession in America – and to raise its value in society – we must elevate teachers among the respected doctors and business leaders of our time, professionalize the industry with rigorous teacher preparation, compensation and support, and offer teachers new, innovative structures in which to develop our nation’s greatest assets. Only then will we have acknowledged teachers’ evolved and critical roles in weaving the fabric of American society.

Connected Stories

  • What Happens When Graduation is a Dead End

    Without DACA or a pathway to citizenship, hundreds of thousands of young undocumented people cannot realize their full potential—to our collective detriment.

    Education, and Immigration
  • Remote Learning is Intensifying America's 'Homework Gap'

    More than 50 million students were forced to switch to online learning because of COVID-19 — but for those without broadband access, the ‘homework gap’ is only getting worse.

    Education
  • Resources for Remote Learning

    As we begin to mobilize solutions and confront challenges together, the significance of our connections with one another—as individuals, families, and communities—becomes ever more clear.

    Education, and COVID-19

From Our Network

  • Wide Open School

    Some of the most respected companies in education, media, & tech offer a free & open collection of quality online learning resources to educators & families!

    Common Sense Media

Stay Informed

Join our mailing list and follow us on social.

Email address is not valid. Email addresses should follow the format user@domain.com and must originate from a valid domain.

You may unsubscribe at any time. By submitting information, you accept our Privacy Policy.

  • facebook
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • linkedin

Copyright © 2021 Emerson Collective

  • Terms and Conditions
  • Privacy Policy
  • Unsolicited Submission Policy
  • Fraudulent Requests