Pat Nabong/Chicago Sun-Times via AP
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten speaks during a strike at the University of Illinois Chicago, January 17, 2023, in Chicago.
Watching the news, you might think that teachers are the most disrespected workers in America. Reading state budgets, you might think they’re the most underpaid.
That first assertion is true only if you limit your intake to the anti-teacher jihads that the right is currently waging. As poll after poll makes clear, however, the great majority of Americans actually think well of their teachers—and perhaps even more important, support their freedom to teach. If anything, the polling here is even more lopsided. As one recent CBS News/YouGov poll showed, when asked if books used in public schools should “ever be banned for criticizing U.S. history,” fully 83 percent of the public answered “no.”
That second assertion, sadly, is on the money. As a recent survey by the Economic Policy Institute demonstrated, teacher pay has been falling relative to the pay of other college graduates since 1979.
Take that declining level of monetary support, add to it the challenges of pandemic-era and post-pandemic-era teaching, and that of becoming the whipping boy of right-wing politicos and media mouths, and you find that the share of teachers who report that they’re “very satisfied” with their job fell from 62 percent in 2008 to a bare 12 percent in 2022, according to a recent survey by MetLife.
All these topics were the subject of a major address earlier this week by Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers. In the current crop of American labor leaders, Weingarten is the one who most seriously engages and frequently addresses broad societal concerns, somewhat in the tradition of such past unionists as the UAW’s Walter Reuther and the Clothing Workers’ Sidney Hillman.
The right’s current attacks on public education, she began, have to be viewed as an effort to destroy it. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s universal voucher program, which he signed into law on Monday, will reduce support for his state’s public schools by $4 billion—this in a state, she noted, that already ranks 44th in per-pupil spending and 48th in average teacher pay.
To counter the state defunding, the ideological delegitimizing, and the eventual destruction of public education, Weingarten advanced several strategies that her union is pursuing. The first called for establishing more community schools, with wraparound services provided before, during, and after the usual school day. Citing the examples of several unionized community schools, those services have included medical checkups and mental health services, food assistance, clothing, language support, and legal aid. That obviously requires ample public funding, but it also addresses the manifest crises that afflict today’s children and their families.
She called as well for an increase in experiential learning, highlighting in particular “programs where students use their minds and their hands to learn everything from auto repair, to nursing, IT, graphic design, welding, culinary skills and hospitality.” She cited the AFT’s project to help teachers who’ve come under attack for teaching topics that the right doesn’t want taught—a phone hotline “for teachers, parents, or students to use if they need support.”
“It’s a place to call if you’ve been told to remove a book from the curriculum or from the library,” she said, “or that there are topics that can’t be discussed in your classes, or that you cannot teach honestly and appropriately, or if politicians in your district or state are targeting vulnerable student groups to score political points.”
Arresting the decline in the number of teachers by making teaching a more livable profession, she pointed to a contract recently won by the AFT’s Kansas City local. That contract created a category of mentor teachers (with mentor-level compensation) who’d guide first- and second-year teachers in classroom skills, and which also created paid family leave for teachers with children, making Kansas City the first school district in the state to provide what should be a standard benefit.
“Teachers should have the freedom to teach, and students should have the freedom to learn,” Weingarten concluded. “A great nation does not fear people being educated.”
