The Teacher Salary Project: Changing the Way We See Teachers

With all this talk of teacher effectiveness -- and of research that points again and again to classroom teachers being the most significant factor in student achievement -- it makes sense to take a look at how teachers are compensated. Enter the Teacher Salary Project (TSP), a national campaign and feature-length documentary film-in-progress that examines the impact that low teacher salaries have on schools, students, and communities around the country.

The project is based on the success of the book Teachers Have it Easy, published in 2003 by journalist and teacher Daniel Moulthrop, writer Dave Eggers, and co-founder of the student writing center 826 National, Ninive Calegari. “America’s democracy and economic well-being relies on teachers being excellent,” Calegari said recently during a WNYC interview. “We need to say to them, ‘You are important to our democracy, and we want to honor that.'" A legitimate salary, she says, is part of that message.

The film, directed by award-winning filmmaker Vanessa Roth and produced by Eggers and Calegari, will winnow down a hundred hours of footage into a documentary they plan to premiere on National Teacher Day 2011 (the first week in May). TSP also encourages teachers, students, and community members to submit their own stories to the campaign through video and other media. Some of these will make it into the film, and the rest will add to TSP’s online archive -- all in an effort to generate as much buzz as possible about the importance of the teaching profession.

Partners on the initiative include the Forum for Education and Democracy and Rethink Learning Now; TSP also made GOOD Magazine's 2009 Top 100 Best Ideas of the Year in October. They’ve entered a 60-second short to the Pepsi Refresh Project, too, a grant contest that allows the public to vote on (and therefore fund) grant-worthy ideas (the link is now posted on the TSP website; voting is open all February.)

The point, say TSP advocates, is not to nitpick about how many hours teachers work, how hard they work, or whether they really get summers off. A better question might be: Why is the teaching profession valuable, and how do we as a society demonstrate that value?

I, for one, am pretty tired of that obnoxious cliché still floating around: “If you can’t do, teach.” I’m tired of hearing that Berkeley or Harvard grads ought to consider themselves less ambitious should they choose to put their education to work in education. Teach for America helped change that attitude to some extent; maybe the Teacher Salary Project can make headway, too.