heart of communities across the United States, and teachers are at the heart of schools.

Today's guest shares a year in the life of three teachers, the schools in which they teach, and the children whose lives they shape.

She's Alexandra Robbins, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- Our guest this week is Alexandra Robbins, whose new book is "The Teachers: A Year Inside America's Most Vulnerable, Important Profession."

Alexandra, thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you very much for having me.

- You know, the book I mentioned to you before we started recording, as the husband of an educator, the son of an educator, the brother of an educator, the book really rings true and really captures what it is to be a teacher today.

One of the things that struck me is that you really make a compelling case that as a society we undervalue teachers.

Can you tell us a little bit about that?

- Well, yeah, it's true.

I mean, it's arguable that teachers are the most important contributors to society because they're the most influential people during the formative years of future generations.

Nobody could be anything unless a teacher had taught them how to be that in the first place.

Teachers are essential, and yet they're underpaid, they're disrespected, they're undervalued, and we as a society keep piling more and more and more on them without giving them the time, resources, support staff or compensation necessary to achieve the goals we're giving them.

- Is this a recent phenomena?

I'm reminded of an editorial cartoon that Daryl Cagle wrote maybe about 13 years ago, juxtapositioning two parents that are upset with a student for failing an exam in 1960 against two parents who were upset with a teacher for their student failing in 2010.

Is that lack of respect getting worse with time?

- I would say it has been around since the beginning of the teaching profession.

This has always been a female dominated workforce supervised by a mostly male management.

And some of the attitudes that manifested back when teaching in this country began have lingered.

However, I do think that there is more disrespect now.

I think that part of that has to do with social media and how effective social media can be at making group polarization more extreme and leading people to just sort of try and one up each other on comments and rile each other up.

I think it also has to do with the change in teaching going back to the beginning of this century when No Child Left Behind really was a game changer.

No Child Left Behind meant that high stakes testing drove education.

It led to a climate of fear, it led to a climate of competition, and it led to a feeling among parents that because the government was judging teachers, schools, and students by their scores that parents should then judge schools and teachers that way as well.

- So, talk about how much we are asking teachers to do today.

You have three central characters in your great book that get into that, and you have a lot of other teachers and other people that provide input also.

How much are we asking teachers to do in 2023?

- We're asking teachers to do the impossible.

We are asking them to take on all the duties that a teacher signed up for, the teaching the students part, and then we're adding administrative duties.

We're adding duties that the government should be handling, but society has failed us, and therefore teachers must step up.

Teachers are now counselors, they're social workers.

They're benefactors to the extent that they can be.

They're charity workers.

They're doing all these things for students that other people should be doing.

But because school districts are not providing the resources and support staff, they just sort of keep punting things to the teachers.

In many cases, administrators are also piling administrative duties on teachers, and these are all things that teachers should not have to handle above and beyond what they do to teach classroom, which is to teach children in a classroom which is what they signed up for.

And even just the teaching part, we're not giving them enough paid contracted hours to fulfill that.

So now you add all these other things and it's too much.

Teachers are not getting paid for the overtime, and they are working late nights, waking up early, skipping lunches, using their planning periods to cover for other teachers because districts don't have enough subs and it's too much.

That's one reason why we're losing them so quickly.

- I was struck by what you just said and when I was reading the book, how overwhelming this is and the pay is, it's ridiculous.

I mean, if you look at one end of the salary scale, you've got CEOs who are making a whole lot of money, and then you have teachers who are really making for what they're doing, I would say pennies.

Talk about that.

How did that happen and why do we allow that to happen?

I mean, they should be paid so much more for such an important job.

- Yeah, and that's something I think people hear a lot, but they don't understand how big a deal it is and how we are not paying teachers enough to be able to do their job to the point where approximately 70% of teachers have had to work a second job just to be able to make ends meet so they could continue to be a teacher.

That's ridiculous.

Penny, one of the teachers I've followed, she was a middle school math teacher in the south.

She was an 18 year veteran.

She had won some awards.

She was a beloved teacher recognized by her district, and she made $47,000 a year.

- Well, and it's bigger than just salaries too.

You report that 94% of public school teachers report buying materials for use in their classrooms, and that the average public school teacher spends $500 out of their own pocket each year to provide for their classrooms and their students.

How is this not just a colossal public policy failure at every level?

- Yeah, it is a public policy failure at every level, but I think, you know, the powers that be just they seem to have this feeling that since they've always piled things on teachers in the past that teachers will continue to take it because they care so deeply about their students.

For example, in 2020, there was a meme circulating on social media that said teachers don't teach for the income, they teach for the outcome.

And non-educators were like, "Oh, that's so sweet."

And teachers were like, "Well, wait a minute.

This is our job.

Yes, we are here for the kids, but this is also the job that's supposed to afford us a living."

- Well, and this is one of the myths that you tackle in the book, which is the myth of the heroic teacher or the teacher as a martyr.

Can you unpack it a little bit for us?

- Yeah, it's gotten to the point where especially put forward by the media, by movies, by TV shows, there's this sense that teachers have to go above and beyond and sacrifice anything else in their life to be able to properly reach out to all their students and be there completely for all their students.

We sort of glorify the teachers who, oh, this one, and this is wonderful that they do this, but this one adopted her student.

This one donated a kidney to her former student.

This one provides respite care for her special needs students families, and these are amazing, beautiful, wonderful things.

But now it's as if in order to be considered a good teacher, teachers have to sacrifice everything else in their lives.

Miguel, one of the other teachers I followed, was a special education teacher out west, and he actually said that.

He said, "Districts put so much on teachers that it's as if they expect teachers not to have families, not to have a life outside of school because they don't have the time or money to be able to do anything but teach."

- So another myth that you tackle is teacher burnout.

What's the myth and what's the reality, Alexandra?

- So teacher burnout is such a popular phrase that if you look up the word burnout in Merriam Webster Dictionary, the two featured contextual examples are about teacher burnout.

Teacher burnout is what the media uses to refer to, and districts also use this phrase, to refer to teachers' stress or exhaustion or depression because of work.

However, experts looked into what the actual causes of teacher burnout are, and the general consensus is that it's too much workload, high stakes testing, too much pressure, insufficient resources and time.

All of those things are not teacher problems.

Those are school system problems.

So rather than fixing these issues, these clear blatant workplace issues, school systems put it on the teachers and they say, "Oh, you're burnt out because you can't deal with it.

Maybe you should learn to relax or go do some yoga."

They put this all under the umbrella of self-care, and they might say, "Okay, here's a $5 coupon for a massage" or something like that to help address your teacher burnout.

It's like a band-aid solution.

They're saying, "Okay, yeah, we're doing all these things to you, but you need to deal with it because we're not going to change it."

So rather than say teachers are at highest risk for burnout, or the highest rates of burnout among social services professions are among teachers, I would say the employers worst at providing the resources that their employees need are school systems.

- You mentioned the media.

Why can't the media get this right?

I mean, the media, obviously, we're talking about many different outlets, newspapers, TV and so forth, but the media does get at least parts of it, some things right.

Coverage of politics, for example, many outlets, many publications get that right.

They spend the time, the resources to get it right.

What's happened with teaching?

Why can't that be gotten right, too?

- You know, I don't know.

You would probably have something more to say about that because, you know, you are members, established members of the media, and I'm curious why it's so hard to get the media to report on the nitty gritty of what teachers are actually going through.

You know, there was this one time, I think it was around 2000, was it 2018, 2016, when there was this whole wave of media reporting on the teacher strikes.

And, you know, there were headlines like "This teacher donates plasma every so number of weeks just to be able to keep on teaching."

There was this one wave of that, but I don't know.

I feel like the responses I've been getting when I pitch things to the media in many places are, "Well, we've covered that.

People already know about that."

But they don't.

- I have one hypothesis, and I'm sure there are many others.

- [Alexandra] Please.

- There is such an emphasis on test scores, and this comes from school districts to the media.

And so when test scores are announced or they're coming up or they're debated or teachers are brought into, you know, do you like this or not like this?

And you get into this in the book, it's an immediate quick story, and it's a relatively easy story to write.

And with limited resources, those stories get written.

Going deeper, as I said, takes more than just, you know, a quick hit story.

That would be one hypothesis that I might have.

I'm sure there are others too.

- Alexandra, this book is such a humanizing account of what it is to be a teacher and sort of the victories and the defeats and the tragedies and the joy that really sort of characterize a year in the life of three teachers in particular.

I'm curious, though, where did you get the inspiration to write this particular book?

- Well, I've been wanting to write this for a long time.

After I wrote a book about nurses that was published in 2015, teachers came to me and said, "You know, we are a very similar profession," and they're right, they are.

It's another very underappreciated female dominated workforce profession.

And I had already been looking into teachers before that, but after "The Nurses" came out and teachers just started coming to me in droves, I was just thinking, you know, this has been going on for a while, this is something I should look into.

I was working on another book at the time, so I had to wait a bit, but I was continuing to interview teachers throughout that period.

Then came 2016, and the attitude towards teachers shifted drastically among certain circles because they were encouraged in their views by the new White House.

So then teachers became, as one teacher said to me, you know, "We weren't hated in the 1990s.

People didn't call us evil or losers in the 1990s."

There was a basic respect for teachers that's missing now.

Since 2016, it's gone up and down, but it seems to be getting progressively worse.

And so I wanted to present teachers' views.

I wanted to present their perspectives on what it's really like to be a teacher because so many people assume that because they went to school, they know what it's like to be an educator.

But in truth, they don't.

- Yeah, that's a frain I've heard in my house my entire life.

You know, one of the questions that you talk about, the changed environment in 2016.

As we head into 2024, schools are already in the crosshairs of the culture wars around the electoral politics of the nation.

Whether we talk about the way Governor Youngkin used CRT, critical race theory, in his campaign in Virginia a few years ago, or the way Governor DeSantis is using "Don't Say Gay" in Florida classrooms.

How does this affect teachers on the ground, if you have a sense of that from all of your research?

- Yes, I've interviewed teachers even since the book came out about how it's affecting them on the ground.

They were terrified in the first place to speak out about injustices they saw in the school system because they have often seen or been targets of retaliation from anybody from parents to school district officials to even their own administrators in their building.

I hear from a lot of teachers who have been dealing with that over the years.

When this became political, it became scarier.

You know, one teacher told me recently that whereas five years ago, she would've spoken up at a board meeting because of what these parents were saying, now she says she envisions people coming to her house with torches at night.

And so she's scared to speak up.

And it's another reason why I wrote the book because part of this was happening before 2023.

Teachers don't feel like they can speak out.

They don't feel like they have a voice.

They don't feel like they can say what's really going on in the school building because they're afraid they're gonna lose their job.

So it's so important for other people to be proactive and go to teachers and say, "How can I help?"

- Another fear that is relatively new that teachers experience is active shooters, mass shootings.

You talk about some of that in the book as well.

Given all of that, what we were talking about here and the fear of you could die in your classroom, are people still going into teaching?

What do you see on the ground level there in terms of schools that offer degrees in education?

Are people still attracted to it?

And if so, what is still attracting people to the profession?

- Yeah, enrollments in teacher preparation programs has been declining in most places.

There is a school out in Arizona, and I think more schools are gonna do this, that does a scholarship program where if you commit to working in the state for a certain number of years, then you get a scholarship for that number of years for the teaching preparation program, which I think is great.

I think the reason that people still go into teaching and the reason that people stay in teaching despite these dangers is the act of teaching itself, the connections you make with the students and your colleagues are so powerful, so meaningful, so kind of life affirming, as one teacher said to me.

There was a teacher I interviewed in Texas who was making something like $30,000 a year.

He had to work other jobs.

Sometimes he was working 22 hours a day.

His cell phone service was cut off at times, his water was cut off at times, but he just doggedly kept pursuing his teaching career.

And I said, "Why?"

You know, "Why did you do this?

You were making more as a firefighter before you were a teacher and you could make more doing any number of things now and have a much easier life."

And he said, "Because teaching makes my soul happy."

And I think that encapsulates it for a lot of educators.

- You know, I think one of the classic questions that educators ask would be teachers, is there a teacher in your own experience who so inspired you and transformed the way you would approach teaching?

Is there somebody like that in your history?

- In my personal history?

- [Jim] Yeah.

- Oh, I would say there are, I mean, I can think of maybe six right off the bat.

I was very fortunate to have wonderful teachers, some of whom I still keep in touch with.

My entire journalism training consisted of my high school journalism classes because my college at the time did not offer journalism.

So yes, teachers played a very important role in my life, and I respect them tremendously.

- In fact, you've become a substitute teacher yourself, even in the writing of this book.

Talk to us a little bit about that.

- I've been substituting for about four years.

I started out because I had read an article that said that there was a substitute shortage in a local district.

And before the pandemic, people didn't know that schools were having trouble finding subs.

I don't think substitutes were pretty much ever in the news unless there was some problem with one or something like that.

So I asked local administrators and I asked teachers, and I said, "Is this true?

Are you having trouble finding subs?"

And they said, "Yes."

So I said, "Okay, well, I can sign up."

So I signed up expecting to do it, you know, maybe once every week or two just as a break from sitting in front of my computer writing or reporting.

But I fell in love with it, and I enjoyed connecting with the students so much.

I enjoyed learning from the other teachers, because sometimes I would sub as a paraeducator in the classroom, which was always wonderful because I got to help in the classroom, but also observe a teacher teaching, which I learned a lot from.

During the 2021, 2022 school year, a school where I had short-term subbed many, many times, found itself in a position a couple days before the August open house in which they had been allotted an extra class, but couldn't find a teacher.

This was before elementary school students could be vaccinated.

There was a lot of trouble filling vacancies at that time.

I think it was the Delta wave.

There was some new wave of COVID that was coming.

And so they asked if I would take over a third grade classroom until they could find somebody.

Well, I ended up full-time teaching third grade from August all the way through winter break, which I'm so glad that happened because it really gave me a bird's eye view about what teachers had been telling me and were telling me at the time about what was going on in the classroom.

Now, I had a wonderful administration, wonderful parents, wonderful coworkers.

I loved my students.

It was really an ideal magical situation.

And yet I was working until, you know, sometimes midnight every night just to get everything done.

And by the end of that year, I had worked as a substitute more than 150 days out of 180, which is almost an entire school year.

And for that, including all the retention bonuses, the working during COVID bonuses, I worked during every operational emergency day, which is just the way the district categorized days in which they had a lot of absences, so they really, really needed subs, I made $17,628.30.

So.

- Wow, that is- - [Alexandra] That was a good perspective for me.

- [Jim] Wow.

- That is so wrong.

Are you still subbing?

- Yes, in fact, I subbed right up until the end of this year.

Yep, and I'm already long-term subbing 5th grade for a few weeks in the fall.

- You know, you mentioned the pandemic.

We've got about two minutes left here.

You made a conscious decision not to focus the book on the pandemic, although you probably very easily could have.

Why not?

- Because while the pandemic exacerbated the problems of the teaching profession, those problems existed long beforehand in the educational landscape.

And they're not gonna resolve just because we're getting out of the pandemic era.

We need people to pay attention to the underlying issues, and we need decision makers to enact policies that will improve teachers' working conditions, pandemic or not.

- So you have three anchor stories in your book, but you also have vignettes from, I couldn't even count them, hundreds, thousands.

How did you get all of this information?

How did you find these people?

Did they come to you?

Did you advertise?

How did you find all these people?

Because it really is extraordinary the input from all across this country, really at all levels that you were able to get and put into your book.

- [Jim] We've got about a minute left, Alexandra.

- Okay, then I'll nutshell it by saying, yes, I reached out to many people, but it is not hard to get teachers to tell you their stories when you say, "I'm not gonna put your name in this."

They have so much to say.

They are so afraid to speak out because of retaliation, that it was a joy and a catharsis for them to be able to share their opinion without being worried about losing their jobs for doing so.

- Yeah, at the end of the day, are you an optimist about the future of teaching as a profession?

- Yes, because teachers have hit such rock bottom that parents now are understanding what's going on with teachers, and it's up to parents to stand up for teachers.

It's up for community members to speak out for teachers.

A recent survey found that 80% of parents are very happy with their local schools.

The negativity we hear from the fringes, the majority of those people this survey said don't actually have school aged children at home.

So once we get the word out that people who support teachers need to go to the board meetings and stand up for them, need to start petitions, need to provide resources and lobby lawmakers, I think the tides will turn.

There just has to be a more coordinated effort for those of us who are educated allies.

- Well, the book is "The Teachers."

Alexandra Robbins, it's outstanding.

Thank you so much for being with us.

That is all the time we have this week.

But if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

He's Wayne, I'm Jim, asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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