On April 26, 1983, Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States, accepted a report on the state of the country’s education system in the White House. In his speech, Reagan commented on the critical position of the school system and made a few lighthearted jokes. The report, named “A Nation at Risk”, was presented by a panel of leading educators and signaled the Sputnik moment for American education. The report claimed that the educational foundation of society was weakening, and the nation was risking to face an uncertain future.
Reagan amplified the expression of worry, and the media drove the message to all corners of the country. As Dana Goldstein’s book, “The Teacher Wars”, explains, one of the most influential public documents in the United States was created. Positive aspects, including the establishment of the Department of Education, were secured despite Reagan’s pledge to abolish it in his 1980 campaign. Nevertheless, creating a storyline of failure arguably led to a cycle of teacher condemnation and underpayment that gave the current Trump administration’s deficiencies perspective.
Jonathan Kozol, a long-time education activist and author of various leading books on public education, remarked, “In several states, teachers are forced to work two jobs to meet even the basic necessities of a middle-class lifestyle. Therefore, they work for Uber on weekends or at night and use their income to purchase basic school supplies. The situation has only worsened for both teachers and students with the Trump administration, but the miserable conditions have existed long before Trump’s era.”
Kozol also recalled Reagan’s era reviewing the “A Nation at Risk” report. “The theme was that our schools were choked by a tide of mediocrity attributed to teachers. Teachers were regarded as too indulgent with their pupils. This was partly an outcome of conservative responses to the progressive values of the 60s. Teachers were labeled lazy, and they served their interests by securing summers off, making their job easier. The most unconscionable accusation was against the teacher unions.”
Kozol accused Reagan’s education secretary, Bill Bennett, of being a “big-time bully.” Sandra Feldman, the president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, labeled Bennett “disdainful for the profession” in a New York Times interview in 1988. The conservative think-tanks then started demanding a more strict approach towards teachers and students, leading to George W. Bush’s adoption of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. The law required student testing in math and reading every year and punished underperforming schools.
Kozol explained, “No excuse to the extent that even if the children are from poor backgrounds, teachers will not be excused if they cannot advance the test scores by a few percentage points annually. The other part of George W. Bush’s solution was the proliferation of charter schools, which employed untrained teachers for a low price. The majority of these teachers were fresh college grads who were willing to teach for just a few years before entering business schools. This pattern deprofessionalized teaching and implied that anyone who was smart and went to Yale or Princeton could handle the job.”
Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W. Bush all endorsed a strong faith in market forces and began a broad assault on trade unions and their members, including teachers. In 2004, Roderick Paige, the education secretary at the time, referred to the National Education Association, the United States’ largest teachers’ union, as a "terrorist organization" for opposing the No Child Left Behind act. Nevertheless, he retracted his statement and expressed his apologies to the union.
In 2011, Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin passed Act 10 which had a devastating impact on the teachers and public sector unions. This resulted in significant cuts to teacher salaries and benefits a few years later. Similar actions were taken by other states like Indiana, Massachusetts, and Ohio, where teachers’ collective bargaining rights were weakened. Randi Weingarten, who is the President of the American Federation of Teachers, is critical of the hard-right approach that is focused on monetizing and privatizing everything from Milton Friedman, Koch Brothers, DeVos, and conservative-based groups. She believes that their policies aim to systematic and roboticize teaching, reduce teachers to algorithms, and transform students into test scores. These changes have created problems and turned out to be terrible because they controlled the feature for virtually every decision made in schools.
Former Democratic President Barack Obama had proposed the Race to the Top initiative to address this situation in 2009. It offered $4.35bn to states to improve education. However, the policies he put in place focused mainly on expanding charter schools and linking test scores to teacher evaluations, which was not effective. Weingarten argues that policymakers’ priority was to use test scores, rather than teachers’ judgments and children’s needs, as the controlling factor. Teacher unions became the bogeyman because they were standing up for the funding of children’s education.
The 2008-09 financial crisis compounded these trends by giving an excuse to drastically cut school funding and freeze teacher salaries. Even when the economy recovered, funding and salaries were not restored at the same rate as other professions. Republican-controlled states prioritized tax cuts over public education. There are considerable variations across the 50 states in terms of school funding approaches and rules. Therefore, it’s difficult to find central solutions to the undervaluation of teachers and the unique scrutiny their profession faces.
Patricia Levesque, who is the CEO of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, observes that different states like Florida have different mechanisms for providing teacher pay. In Florida, the mechanism is providing increases in the public school budget that is put together through local collective bargaining.
Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, argues that relying on states to fund education is not enough. The federal government needs to step in and provide financial leverage in order to raise the number of teachers, improve the status of teaching, and preserve the jobs that have been eliminated. The first step is to increase funding and offer greater financial support.