The Teacher Salary Project Has Launched
On Friday, a press release went out announcing the launch of the website for The Teacher Salary Project. This website is an interactive forum to continue the conversation on teachers’ salaries that began with the book “Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers,” written by Daniel Moulthrop, Dave Eggers, and Nínive Calegari. The site also serves as a first step towards a new documentary project to be produced by Eggers, Calegari, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth.
Roth, who has been making award-winning documentaries for over a decade, says, “The exciting part of this project from a filmmaking perspective is that we’re not asking the education community to just sit back and watch our film, but to be real partners in shaping the stories we tell and the effect we have on education reform.”
The documentary will tell the stories of the men and women who do the heavy lifting in education, the ones closest to our children — the 3.2 million teachers who spend every day in classrooms in every corner of the country. The film will follow 3-5 teachers at different stages in their careers, all of whom are struggling with the conditions in which they’re teaching. Weaving in commentary by policy experts on every side of the debate, the film will bring awareness to the real and imminent crisis in our educational system. In keeping with the storytelling styles of Eggers and Roth, the documentary will be a character-driven film, which will tell moving and compelling stories that explore this urgent issue through humor, warmth, provocative questions, and the energy of the teachers who fill the screen.
The result will show how devastating the effect of poor teacher conditions are on schools and children. Where teachers are underpaid, staff turnover is constant, schools are unstable, and students are taught by substitutes and poorly trained teachers, the results are predictably awful. By contrast, in schools where teachers can afford to build a life as an educator, the teachers grow and gain mastery, the schools attract the best from around the country, and test scores and college admissions soar. America can dramatically change its education system within a generation. Focusing on attracting, supporting and retaining the best teacher force in history is the first step in doing so.
Check out the site to learn more. And if you are a teacher, you should look at the casting call to be a part of the film.
I was in a masters degree program that was 80% filled with teachers from various schools and grades. After getting to know them, other than my degree what I took away from the experience was that there was no way in the world I would want to be a public school teacher do to the amount of work required for so little pay, and so little respect. It’s a shame but it seems teachers all over the world are in the same situation, what is it about human beings that we don’t place value on teachers generally speaking?