Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers - Hardcover

Eggers, Dave; Moulthrop, Daniel; Calegari, Ninive Clements

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565849558 ISBN 13: 9781565849556

Publisher: The New Press, 2005

Synopsis

A passionate call to action for improving the working lives of public school teachers cites the typically low wages of today's educators and the consequences of current policies on the quality of education, sharing the personal stories of teachers from across the country, an analysis of typical public school working conditions, and misconceptions about teaching careers. 40,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Pulitzer Prize finalist and McSweeney's editor Dave Eggers is the founder of 826 Valencia, a nonprofit tutoring and writing lab in San Francisco with a new center in Brooklyn. Teacher Nínive Clements Calegari is the founding executive director of 826 Valencia. Daniel Moulthrop is completing a master's in journalism at the University of California-Berkeley. All live in the San Francisco Bay area.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This book provides a punchy, thoughtful look at the issues surrounding teacher salaries in the public school system. And while it is openly biased on the subject-the authors see salary reform as the best way to ameliorate many of the problems facing America's public schools-this bias never compromises its even-handed consideration of the current debate. In part, this is because the authors wisely ground the book in the words and experiences of teachers themselves. The stories of high ideals and hard work compromised by the brutal conditions facing teachers speak for themselves, allowing the authors to make their points by interspersing short passages that highlight the key issues raised by the vignettes. Whether or not one agrees with their solutions, their characterization of the problem is spot-on. Perhaps more valuable, however, is their detailed discussion of actual school reform initiatives. Unlike most of the problems treated here-low pay and little respect for teachers or resource shortages in public schools-these incentives will not be familiar to most readers. Each of them take different approaches to the problems facing public schools and have had varying degrees of success, but all of them illustrate the gains that can be made when committed educators and policymakers work together with shared goals and community support. It's no accident that the book winds up with this informative consideration of solutions (nor that it provides a rich bibliography for further reading as well as contact lists of reform-minded school districts, teacher recruitment agencies and a variety of educational organizations) because in the end it is less a complaint than a call to action, one that will appeal to a wide body of readers.
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About this edition

• Publisher: The New Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1565849558
• ISBN 13: 9781565849556
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 355