 | | A classroom at Whittier Primary School in Hampton, Va., circa 1899.Frances Benjamin Johnston, via Library of Congress |
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“It seems very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month for teaching children the ABC’s when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.” |
— Littleton, Massachusetts School Committee, debating how to source teachers for its classrooms in 1849 |
More than 150 years ago, Massachusetts lawmakers came up with a radical idea: All young people should be educated. The commonwealth passed the country’s first law requiring that children go to school, then was left wondering where to find the teachers it needed to educate all those children. |
A school committee in Littleton, Mass., came up with a simple solution. “God seems to have made woman peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind,” the committee wrote, in 1849. Why pay men $20 a month when “a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.” |
Not only did women appear uniquely fitted to the work of teaching; they also didn’t have competing professional opportunities that would drive wages up — or so the logic went. “The argument was, ‘Look, women will learn to be better mothers by practicing on other people’s children,’” said Richard Ingersoll, a sociologist at University of Pennsylvania. “Proponents made the case it was a win-win.” |
As other states followed Massachusetts’s lead, and public schools opened across the country, they filled with female teachers. By the late 1880s, women made up 63 percent of the country’s teachers. The profession has remained female dominated ever since. |
In 2017, women comprised more than three-quarters of public-school teachers, in a profession that remains stubbornly underpaid and undervalued. |
In 2018, the starting salary for a public-school teacher averaged $38,000. In more than 1,000 districts, even the highest paid public-school teachers with advanced degrees and decades of experience earn less than $50,000. A 2010 report from McKinsey looked at the state of teaching in America compared with other developed countries, like Singapore and Finland, and concluded that their schools attract more teaching talent in part because they offer more competitive pay with bonuses tied to performance. |
On the Global Teacher Status Index, a survey that examines respect for teachers among the general public in 35 countries, America fell in the middle of the pack — ranking at No. 16, far behind China, Malaysia and Taiwan. |
Working at a private school instead of public does not improve pay, either. In fact, private school teachers often earn less, though their working conditions are often better. What does substantially increase a teacher’s salary is working in a high school classroom instead of elementary or preschool. Male teachers are also far more likely to teach older students. |
Now the coronavirus has placed those same underpaid teachers at the heart of a national crisis as the U.S. looks to teachers not only for children’s education and well-being but also as essential child care as parents try to get back to work. |
“Our public education system is a massive hidden child care subsidy,” said Jon Shelton, a historian of the teaching work force at the University of Wisconsin. |
It’s no wonder teachers have faced widespread pressure from parents, community leaders and government officials to return to their classrooms for the new academic year. Districts across the country have been left to chart their own course, pitting the risks of returning to in-person learning against the disadvantages of remaining virtual. New York City schools are finally reopening, with a hybrid of in-person and remote learning, after weeks of delays and uncertainty. It is the only major school district in the country that will restart in-person classes this month. |
Over the next few weeks, In Her Words will share stories from teachers across the U.S. about the complex roles they have played in their students’ lives since the virus first kicked up and how they’re managing school now. |
 | | A selfie at school in Green Bay, Wis. |
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“I can empathize with what families are going through.” |
— Sarah Pamperin, Green Bay, Wis. |
Sarah Pamperin, 33, is a bilingual teacher in Green Bay, Wis., working with Spanish-speaking sixth-grade students at a Green Bay area public school. For her, the early weeks of the pandemic were a haze of nonstop work, all of which felt insufficient to meet her students’ needs. She worked with student services to deliver food, books and jump ropes to their porches. She texted and called them to see how their families were doing. |
Her school is near a meatpacking plant where many of the parents of her students work. In April, it was the site of a major Covid-19 outbreak, resulting in numerous parents being hospitalized. One former student had a parent who died. |
Hoping to help her students process the fast-moving news, she assigned them an essay to write on the pandemic, but her students found it too draining to discuss. The personal stress they were under made it hard for them to focus on academic progress at all. |
“There was a lot of emotional turmoil and we couldn’t do a whole lot of curricular teaching,” she said. “Those were some of the darkest weeks of my life.” Instead of spending her time focused on lesson plans, she found herself consumed by her students’ emotional well-being — contacting those who had to temporarily stay with other relatives, texting with children whose parents were hospitalized. |
Ms. Pamperin is an active union member, but she’s less focused on teachers’ rights and more focused on using her union position to promote the needs of bilingual and non-English speaking parents in her district, pushing for widespread use of a phone app that allows teachers to communicate with families in their native language. She has fought to improve her school’s teachings on racial injustice. |
This summer, when her district decided that schools would continue remote rather than in-person learning in the fall, she “obsessively” tracked which students didn’t have internet access. Through her union, she also asked the district to create learning pods — small clusters of students who could study together daily — but the suggestion was rejected. Some feared this would make the district liable for coronavirus outbreaks. |
She has also scrambled to balance caring for her students with tending to her own sons (ages 2 and 4), one of whom has autism. Her husband has a good job repairing medical equipment at a hospital, but during the early weeks of the outbreak she found herself wishing he could stay home to help her with child care. |
“I was envious of my husband, to be honest,” she said. “Even though he was working in a scary environment, he at least got to leave the house every day.” She also acknowledged, though, how privileged she was to have steady income, unlike so many. |
Ms. Pamperin feels that her personal struggles allow her to connect more deeply with students. She knows what it is like to care for a developmentally disabled child; she also has personal experience living with economic challenges, like more than half of her students. |
“It’s helped me to take more of an activist stance for families, instead of just saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a real bummer,’” she said. “I can empathize with what families are going through.” |
Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed. And one event for the calendar. |
 | | Mileidy Cardentey Fernandez said her requests for more information about the surgical procedure Dr. Amin was advising her to undergo were ignored.Melissa Lyttle for The New York Times |
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- “I could not ask any questions.” Immigrants detained at an ICE-contracted center in Georgia said they had invasive gynecology procedures that they later learned might have been unnecessary. [Read the story]
- “This just compounds the trust issue.” A juror in the Breonna Taylor case contends that the Kentucky attorney general misrepresented the grand jury’s deliberations and failed to offer the panel the option of indicting the two officers who fatally shot the young Black woman, according to the juror’s lawyer. [Read the story]
- “Is it strange to say I miss the bodies of strangers?” Weeks before lockdown, I made a whirlwind tour of Istanbul’s public baths. It was a crash course in pleasure that helped me understand what we’ve lost since, writes Leslie Jamison for The New York Times Magazine. [Read the story]
- “Being a lesbian who’s voting for Trump is like coming out of the closet again.” The Times columnist Bret Stephens talks to a secret Trump voter. [Read the story]
- “How I miss Broadway.” Join the former U.S. Secretary of State (and lifelong theater lover) Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she reflects on theater’s meaning, its absence, and its future, in a special conversation with the theater reporter Michael Paulson. [RSVP here]
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In Her Words is edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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