Class Voices: US Teachers Discuss Their Biggest Challenges – Live | American News

If you have not seen it yet, check out our article on why some schools in Arizona employ Filipinos to fill teacher shortages.

Terry Greene Sterling and Jude Joffe-Block write that some US public schools are turning to foreign teachers because Americans with a university education are less and less interested in demanding, low-paid teaching jobs.

Many teachers, struggling for an incursion into the declining middle class, have changed careers. And fewer students choose to become teachers. The need for teachers in mathematics, science and special education is particularly acute in poor and rural schools in the country.

Melvin Inojosa, 29, from the Philippines, is one of 12,000 foreign teachers who have come to the US in the last five years with J-1 cultural exchange visas. (Three-year visas do not offer any path to permanent residence in the United States).

Inojosa wishes to stay but will teach in Arizona for as long as possible. If the authorities want him to leave, he will leave. No strong feelings. He respects the American laws. He will find a job to teach elsewhere in the world and "will make my own happiness".

Shannon Ergun, a single mother, teaches ESL at a public school in Tacoma, WA, with previous experience in Turkey and Poland.

For her, teaching her students different abilities in a classroom can be a challenge.

"I currently have 178 ESL students on my workload. State law says that I must provide each of these services to students. However, it would take 35 to 36 students per class to do that. I have a variety of students, from those who do not speak English to those who master English, who simply have not passed the ESL exam. I have students who have arrived in the United States in recent days to those who were born and raised here. To meet their needs, I can not simply place more than 35 children in a classroom. I need to be able to target my instructions, so I need to be able to assign students to courses based on their skill and age in some cases. Nobody is served if the students are simply abandoned in the class corresponding to the rest of their schedule and I have to work miracles.

"Because of the challenges above, I am active in my union. I have helped organize rallies and events related to high-risk standardized testing, educator salaries and lack of professional respect. I work directly with lawmakers and other local officials to improve the working conditions of our educators as it improves the learning conditions of our students. My activism often made me a target for district administrators and I was reassigned to a new school, I did not say it before two weeks of the school year and I was not there. I have even been assigned to several schools and levels. No experience ".

As part of our teachers' recovery, we invite all teachers and educators to add stories and personal ideas to this manifesto. Submit ideas, anecdotes and thoughts via our form here.

We'll be gathering your comments in a final manifesto next week – and the Guardian will hand it over to Betsy DeVos, the Education Secretary.

Anna Burr, in Phoenix, AZ, said she's struggling with debt –

"As a teacher, it was said that I would love my job, so the pay would not matter." It was true until this year. I am indebted of $ 100,000 (the promise of a higher salary after obtaining a master's degree seduces me). I earn $ 2,400 a month and half of that amount is rented alone. I'm drowning. I have 40 students in my class and some do not even have their own desk. I was the cool teacher now I am the naughty teacher. They made me hate my dream, I thought I would love this career forever now I just want to do enough where I do not stress at night. My students come to school hungry and leave worried on weekends. I'm a member of the Red for Ed movement here in Arizona, but I feel I can not do enough. "

A reader who answered our call is Andrew Berg, a pre-K teacher from Boston.

Although his school has sufficient resources, teachers find themselves more and more doing things that are not usually expected of them:

"At the national level, school funding is a serious problem because much of it comes from local (municipal) taxes. There is often an inverse correlation between a district's needs and its ability to generate revenue.

"Feeding children, for example, is not the same thing as teaching, but as hungry kids do not learn well, we have to do it.

"Providing clothing, helping families find housing or navigating child protection services, evaluating and managing the effects of trauma are not, strictly speaking, teaching, but we do these things because they are necessary precursors. These things must be done before learning can take place. All of this makes education much more expensive and less effective when instruction time is redirected. It's a social problem. As a country, we decided not to tackle the problems caused by social inequalities, and a lot of this has hit the schools. "

September marks the beginning of the new school year for many US public schools. This is a difficult time for teachers returning to overcrowded classrooms, dilapidated buildings, valuable supplies and obsolete textbooks.

This week we will be telling teachers' stories in a special series called "The Teachian US Take-Overover". We worked closely with a team of teachers from across the country, who are our guest editors from September 5-7 to highlight the decline in teacher salaries, underfunded schools and a new wave of activism.

In this live blog, we will share the stories of teachers who read the project and those who answered our call last week. If you would like to share your experiences and participate in the conversation, you can do so via the secure form below, and we will post it here with your permission.

Let us know if you would like to add your submission to our teachers' wish list – a manifesto outlining the basic conditions teachers need to deal with the crisis in schools. We will update the document with your contributions – and the Guardian will deliver the final version to US Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.