The Teacher Salary Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to raising awareness surrounding the working conditions and salaries of public school teachers throughout America. The mission of The Teacher Salary Project is to address the concerns and issues facing our education system through the eyes and experiences of teachers. It proposes that teacher salary reform is an effective method of attracting and retaining top-quality teachers to the field of education. The project began with the New York Times best-selling book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers, co-authored by teacher and journalist Daniel Moulthrop, co-founder of 826 National Nínive Calegari, and writer Dave Eggers. In 2011, The Teacher Salary Project released the feature-length documentary film American Teacher. The film was officially released at select theaters in several major U.S. cities in the Fall of 2011. [1] [2] In fall of 2013, The Teacher Salary Project launched a Governors' Challenge to take stock of and showcase what each of the fifty state governors are doing to recruit and retain the best teaching force that can most effectively serve their states' students.
Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers ( ISBN 1-565-84955-8) was released in June 2005 and is co-authored by Nínive Calegari, Dave Eggers, and Daniel Moulthrop. [3] The book utilizes a large catalog of teacher testimonies in portraying the working conditions of public school teachers throughout various urban and rural areas across America. The subject of teacher salary reform is addressed in light of the teacher accounts therein that portray a job that, however rewarding, is demanding and trying upon one's time and finances. [4] [5] The book follows the wide range of teacher testimonies with a chapter that contrasts a typical day of a teacher alongside that of a pharmaceutical salesman. [6] The book also investigates several districts and schools that have made successful reforms on the teacher salary level. [7]
Examples of successful reform are highlighted in Denver's ProComp system, which was initiated in 2006 and rewarded teachers performance bonuses for education, student achievement, and for teaching in hard-to-staff and/or hard-to-serve positions; The Vaughn Next Center Learning in Los Angeles, California for their innovative methods in evaluating teachers and rewarding them for effective performance; and, lastly, the public school district in Helena, Montana in how they were able to free up $1 million to be used in attracting and rewarding top-quality teachers. [8]
The book has appeared on the New York Times extended best-seller list and has been featured on C-SPAN, and NPR's Marketplace. [9] [10]
American Teacher is a feature-length documentary created and produced by The Teacher Salary Project. Following the format of the book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers, the film utilizes a large collection of teacher testimonies and contrasts the demands of the teaching profession alongside interviews with education experts and education reform news from around the country.
The Governors' Challenge began with the November mailing of American Teacher, along with a brochure about teachers, teachers' finances, and action steps for governors to take with their staff, to every U.S. governor, governors' spouse, and Chief State School Officer. Based on the premise that, as leaders of their states, governors have tremendous influence and ability to generate political will to prioritize important policies like teacher pay, the Governors' Challenge aims to showcase what each governor is doing (or not) to support improved teacher salaries with the goal of attracting and retaining great teachers for every student. The Teacher Salary Project developed an online interactive map to publish the latest and most innovative efforts to improve teacher pay throughout all fifty states in one comprehensive site, where governors will be applauded for their efforts to help elevate the prestige of teaching in their state and to attract talented individuals to the teaching profession. The site is intended to enable governors across the country to learn from one another and adopt similar strategies for elevating the teaching profession in their own states to be a financially attractive, prestigious, and sustainable profession.
A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching.
Dave Eggers is an American writer, editor, and publisher. He is best known for his 2000 memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which became a bestseller and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Eggers is also the founder of several notable literary and philanthropic ventures, including the literary journal Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, the literacy project 826 Valencia, and the human rights nonprofit Voice of Witness. Additionally, he founded ScholarMatch, a program that connects donors with students needing funds for college tuition. His writing has appeared in numerous prestigious publications, including The New Yorker, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine.
Education policy consists of the principles and policy decisions that influence the field of education, as well as the collection of laws and rules that govern the operation of education systems. Education governance may be shared between the local, state, and federal government at varying levels. Some analysts see education policy in terms of social engineering.
The Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) is the education school of Harvard University, a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1920, it was the first school to grant the EdD degree and the first Harvard school to award degrees to women. HGSE enrolls more than 800 students in its one-year master of education (Ed.M.) and three-year doctor of education leadership (Ed.L.D.) programs.
Rhonda "Randi" Weingarten is an American labor leader, attorney, and educator. She has been president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) since 2008, and is a member of the AFL-CIO. She is the former president of the United Federation of Teachers.
The National Teacher of the Year is a professional award in the United States. The program began in 1952, as a project by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO), and aims to reward excellence in teaching. It is sponsored by ING.
Teacher education or teacher training refers to programs, policies, procedures, and provision designed to equip (prospective) teachers with the knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, approaches, methodologies and skills they require to perform their tasks effectively in the classroom, school, and wider community. The professionals who engage in training the prospective teachers are called teacher educators.
Merit pay, merit increase or pay for performance, is performance-related pay, most frequently in the context of educational reform or government civil service reform. It provides bonuses for workers who perform their jobs effectively, according to easily measurable criteria. In the United States, policy makers are divided on whether merit pay should be offered to public school teachers, and other public employees, as is commonly the case in the United Kingdom.
826 National is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping students, ages 6–18, improve their expository and creative writing skills. The organization's eight chapters include 826 Valencia in San Francisco, 826NYC in Brooklyn, 826LA in Los Angeles, 826CHI in Chicago, 826Michigan, 826 Boston in Boston, 826DC in Washington, DC, 826 New Orleans, and 826MSP.
Nínive Clements Calegari is an educator in the United States. Following ten years of classroom experience in public schools, she became an author and founded a national literacy program, 826 National. She also founded The Teacher Salary Project. Currently she is the CEO of Enterprise for Youth, an organization that empowers young people to prepare for and discover career opportunities in the San Francisco area through a three-phase program model of job-readiness training, paid internships with college credit, and ongoing career development and networking support.
Michelle Ann Rhee is an American educator and advocate for education reform. She was Chancellor of District of Columbia Public Schools from 2007 to 2010. In late 2010, she founded StudentsFirst, a non-profit organization that works on education reform.
The Moulthrop family are three generations of American woodturners, starting with Ed Moulthrop, credited as the "father of modern woodturning". The family has been documented in the book Moulthrop: A Legacy in Wood.
The Haitian Educational System yields the lowest total rate in the education realm of the Western Hemisphere. Haiti's literacy rate of about 61% is below the 90% average literacy rate for Latin American and Caribbean countries. The country faces shortages in educational supplies and qualified teachers. The rural population is less educated than the urban. The 2010 Haiti earthquake exacerbated the already constrained parameters on Haiti's educational system by destroying infrastructure and displacing 50–90% of the students, depending on locale.
Samuel Totten is an American professor of history noted for his scholarship on genocide. Totten was a distinguished professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville where he taught from 1987 to 2012 and served as the chief editor of the journal Genocide Studies and Prevention. He is a Member of the Council of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem.
Voice of Witness is a non-profit organization that uses oral history to illuminate contemporary human rights crises in the U.S. and around the world through an oral history book series and an education program. Voice of Witness publish books that present narratives from survivors of human rights crises including: exonerated men and women; residents of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina; undocumented workers in the United States; and persons abducted and displaced as a result of the civil war in southern Sudan. The Voice of Witness Education Program brings these stories, and the issues they reflect, into high schools and impacted communities through oral history-based curricula and holistic educator support.
StudentsFirst is a political lobbying organization formed in 2010 by Michelle Rhee, former school chancellor of Washington D.C. public schools, in support of education reform. The organization worked to pass state laws on issues such as expanding charter schools and teacher tenure reform. On March 29, 2016, it announced some of its state chapters would merge with 50CAN, and its Sacramento headquarters would downsize.
Sir Michael Wilshaw was the Chief Inspector of Schools in England and head of Ofsted from 2012 until 2016.
Spells Writing Lab, Inc. aka (“Spells”) is a Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US-based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that develops the creative and expository writing abilities of school-age children, 6 to 18 years old, through writing programs and teacher development. Spells was inspired by the model established by 826 National an organization started by educator Nínive Calegari and Dave Eggers, author of "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," and founder of the publishing house, McSweeney's.
American Teacher is a 2011 documentary film co-directed by Vanessa Roth and Brian McGinn and produced by The Teacher Salary Project. It follows the format of the book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America’s Teachers.
Carolyn Thompson Taylor is an American academic and politician who served in the Oklahoma House of Representatives from 1984 to 1992. Before running for office, Taylor taught AP government at Norman High School from 1979 to 1984. While in the House, she was chair of the Education Committee and Appropriations Sub-Committee on Education. She was a principal author of numerous landmark education bills involving both higher education and public schools. She also authored legislation concerning health care for children and family leave. While in office she was an adjunct professor at Oklahoma Baptist University and the University of Oklahoma. After leaving office, Taylor was vice president of academic affairs at the University Center of Tulsa and later a distinguished professor of political science at Rogers State.