OPINION: Teachers need help. Teachers need compensation. Teachers need respect!

Everybody knows a teacher, has been taught and influenced by a teacher, and has witnessed the unnecessarily tough life many teachers have lived. By this, the writer is not implying every teacher is a poverty-case. Having taught at the secondary and collegiate levels for more than 45 years and having observed and supported elementary teachers for more than four decades, however, he can speak on the topic with a high degree of familiarity. It is because of this familiarity that he has such empathy as to want to speak up of behalf of teachers.

He can remember beginning school and being taught by Mrs. Annie Randall. She was an elderly woman dedicated and apparently competent. His biggest frustration, however, was that she had to try and teach nearly three dozen children, who were in pre-K, Kindergarten, and first grade. It took almost all the energy she could muster just to get their attention and keep them from distracting one another. 

While we realize this may have been an extreme condition based upon another time period, in 2024, in Jackson, Mississippi, the writer is aware of some classrooms where one teacher is charged with teaching and overseeing more than 30 children in one room for seven hours a day. Such teachers need help.

One could ask, what parent do you think, who has the ability, would be willing to oversee that many children for that long, day-in and day-out, even if they were their own children who were used to the same rules? 

In many other countries, where school children score much higher on various academic tests, classes are smaller and there is usually more than one teacher in the room. If the teachers had more help in the classroom, they obviously could do a better job of diagnosing and providing for the needs of each student. That principle can apply even in high schools and colleges. Teachers need help, at every level.

Just as teachers need more help, they need better compensation. Again, when the writer was growing up, there were some teachers who chopped and picked cotton along with the rest of the community, not because that was a healthy or cultural thing to do. They had to do it in order to make ends meet. That may have been decades ago, but in the year 2024, there are some teachers seeking various forms of public assistance in order to make ends meet. The writer is also aware of some teachers applying for unemployment compensation when school is out each year. 

In no school district, of which the writer is aware, are teachers paid on the scale of engineers, lawyers, doctors, or other professionals having similar years of training. The pay of many teachers is just above that of baby-sitters, not professional care-givers, baby-sitters. Of course, the pay of baby-sitters is shameful given the importance of their charge. Teachers care for and develop the same things, the future of the country and the world.

Because the compensation of teachers is at such a low level, many students who have great academic ability and may even prefer to teach, choose other career paths. Some choose the other paths because they do not want the financial struggle teachers undergo. Some are steered into other paths by well-meaning family, friends, or counselors. Then, there are some who try teaching for a spell, but opt out to do something more financially rewarding, even if it is education administration. 

When one studies the field of college teaching, he/she often finds that they too are underpaid. There are some public school districts paying their experienced teachers more than what similarly experienced teachers are paid at the nearby college or university. Teachers at every level need compensation.

This brings us to the final point. Teachers need respect. They need the respect of their students, the respect of their supervisors and administrators, and the respect of their communities. If they had the respect of their students, there would be less of a discipline problem. (Of course, since children live what they learn, the pattern has to be set by the parents and the community.) If the teachers had the respect of their supervisors and administrators, they would have more academic freedom. If the teachers had the respect of the community, there would be a greater demand for fairer compensation for teachers.

There are cases where students view teachers as “squares” who have settled for lives that are less than fulfilling or the lives of “regular” people. Many students feel that whenever there is a problem or issue their parents will automatically side with them because the teachers are not that much respected. 

Supervisors often do not respect teachers enough to permit them to select their own teaching materials. Boards and administrators decide what curriculum topics and material they must cover and must avoid, even though it is the teachers who are the professionals in the field. Even the matter of determining the topics for teachers’ in-service workshops is decided by the administrators rather than the teachers themselves. 

All this lack of respect and absence of academic freedom helps reduce the teacher to being just a hired hand rather than a respected professional. 

 As one observes the education scene today, with the book banning, the anti-critical race theory policies, and similar political efforts, it should be clear teachers at every level need to be respected. The lack of respect can easily be seen at least as far back as Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution. But it can also be seen as far back as the public school movement itself.

If America, in general, and Mississippi, in particular, are to be moved to where they can and need to be moved, there must be a break with the past where many viewed teachers as “glorified” baby-sitters and people to just teach what they were told, lest they break with the past, leading children astray. Today, teachers must be significantly helped, compensated, and respected as they play a major role in developing the kind of world that can be had.