Education in the US: Teachers

As we begin 2025, let's take a look at education in the United States of America through a teacher's perspective.

"This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.” (Toni Morrison)

Talking about education, now.

I’ve taught for over twenty years in Illinois in varying schools and written online in multiple spaces since 2009. My goal for this Substack is to have honest discussions concerning teaching in the United States.

1. Why this, why now

In 2015, I wrote a few blog posts about the media and its portrayal of teachers and public education’s beginnings. They largely went unnoticed.

Ten years ago when I began my current blog, teachers wanted practical ideas, so I wrote tips about language arts and had my first book published in 2017. Still, my heart felt that the United States needed an analytical look at education, a look at the expectations surrounding teachers.

Ten years later, I shared my frustration concerning the public’s understanding of teachers on Threads. The result was the opposite from a decade ago:

Ten years later, in a different political climate, maybe teachers wanted to talk about their experiences.

2. An imperfect approach

What stories and ideas need shared about public education? Title IX, bullying, inequality in funding, property taxes as funding, laws, oversight—an endless list.

I’m going to focus on teaching because I am a teacher, and I see incomplete stories about teaching. Of course, one teacher’s perceptions is an imperfect approach. I acknowledge this fact.

3. The misconceptions

Like many of you, I was a students in public education once. I saw my teachers drink coffee, distribute worksheets, eat lunch, and give grades. As I moved through the public education system, I noticed they discussed literature and writing, the loves of my life.

That’s a simplistic view of their job. That’s what a student saw them doing. If my involvement in public school systems ended with my high school graduation in 1997, would I still have such an incomplete understanding of their work?

Sure, as an adult, I might say that teachers’ jobs contained more depth than what a teenager witnessed. But I will add that in my interactions with friends and family, parents of my children’s friends and parents of my students, large misconceptions exist.

Look at my above Thread from January 2025. Such a simple myth: Schools provide classroom supplies. It is a dangerous myth though. How many parents and community leaders believe that schools adequately provide for classroom amenities?

I don’t have a holistic understanding of why such misconceptions exist, but I want to analyze the contributing strands. I do believe that a “hangover” of sorts from our childlike beliefs about our teachers exists. I do believe that the media’s portrayal through television, blog posts, movies, viral videos, and news stories contributes to the misunderstandings of teachers’ jobs. I do believe that the superhero (too often combined with a white superhero complex) depiction clouds adults’ lenses of teachers’ jobs.

Finally, I do believe that the fallout from what the United States needs regarding healthcare, fair wages, and justice becomes part of teachers’ jobs.

Maybe through honest dialogue, we can weave those strands into a blanket of understanding that benefits us all.

4. The Elephant: Department of Education

Public schools are for every student—every student. We can’t pretend that as January 2025 marches into reality, the Department of Education isn’t at risk.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

Likewise, I won’t pretend that the timing of this blog is accidental. Teachers need to speak now to protect the DOE.

5. Anyone but us

A mandatory piece of the educational system in the United States is teachers, and I posit that they are often missing from laws, expectations, and conversations. The claim in my post about the media and teachers from years ago was that the expectations and the portrayal of teachers contributed to unrealistic and unfair working conditions for teachers. As I start writing on Substack, I think back to how long the voices of teachers have been missing.

In that decade’s old post of mine, I looked at Glennon Doyle’s nonsensical post from 2014. Her writing went viral and was covered on national news: if teachers would just do this, we would have fewer problems. I cannot find one critical analysis of this popular writer proclaiming, “Share This With All The Schools, Please.” An article assuming that teachers should work over forty hours a week, placing the gun violence situation on schools, and loud-mouthing what teachers should do from a non-teacher—with zero advocacy for more time for teachers to complete this large task—symbolizes the assumptions, misconceptions, and expectations from our society. You’re the heroes, but you won’t be getting any extra time. Don’t not talk about extra money, either. Outsiders know how to do your job, too.

I’m not trying to pick on Doyle (I follow her and her wife on Instagram and overall, find them charming), but her viral post is symbolic of teachers missing from the conversation about work hours and work responsibilities. In her post, the teacher stays after hours on a Friday. The teacher has created a long and intricate system. I’m assuming that the teacher rearranges these desks into a seating chart that accompanies 504 and IEP specifications, yes? Does she create physical copies of the new seating chart for substitute folders? The work of redoing a seating chart is not easy.

Quite honestly, this twenty-year veteran could not weekly complete what Doyle proposes, and the voice of a teacher is missing from the entire blog post. But, the post went viral. Doyle (a non-teacher) confidently wrote about what teachers should do—show HER message to ALL schools. People believe teachers are capable of completing elaborate weekly changes, which makes me wonder if the public wonders why we aren’t doing these elaborate (and unpaid) routines.

Simply put, educators’ voices are missing from what the public expects from us.

6. What won’t I be doing?

It will take a reader two minutes to find where I currently teach. My goal for this Substack is not to dive into my current school district, so please do not read into these posts with a lens of my classroom. My goal for this Substack is to look at education as a teacher, holistically, not specifically about my daily life.

I also won’t be diving into the students’ perspectives of education. I am a mother of three school-aged students, and I hear their perspectives. Honestly, the entire school system needs to be overhauled and modified for everyone involved in it. However, I am not invading my children’s nor my students’ privacy in this space. Minors’ mental health, homework requirements, bullying, class loads, standardized testing—all of those concepts and more deserve analysis. I think they get it too.

What I think is missing from analysis into the school system is the teacher’s perspective, and I aim to provide it here.

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