Christiane: Turning to the teacher crisis facing America.

Staffing shortages, burnout, funding cuts and debates over curriculum are putting pressure on educators, not to mention school shootings.

In her new book, the selling author Alexandra Robbins followed three teachers to see how these issues are changing how they work.

She joins Hari Sreenivasan to discuss the state of teaching in the United States.

Hari: Thank you for joining us.

In the past few weeks we seen headlines from the biggest school systems in the country, both in essential... and New York, about strikes, pensions.

It seems the entire system is going through big changes, and at the core of a lot of these concerns are whether or not there are enough teachers to do the job.

What is happening?

Alexandra: What's happening is that teachers are not being treated properly.

They say there is a teacher shortage, that's a popular term, it is misleading.

There is no teacher shortage.

There is no shortage of people who are wonderful, qualified and willing educators.

There is a shortage of teaching jobs that adequately treat, compensates and respects skilled professionals.

That's not a shortage of people, that's a shortage of support.

Hari: Give me an example, how much is the average teacher making?

What would you think of as the pay gap, if they could go out with the same level of education and get a different kind of job, how much more or less are they making as a teacher?

Alexandra: It depends where you go, on the district and states, but I will give an example.

One of the three teachers I followed for a year for my book, Penny, had 18 years of experience.

She was a veteran teacher, award-winning teacher, and after 18 years she was making $47,000 a year.

That is a problem.

She has to work extra jobs to afford to keep a teacher.

That's something that 70% of educators have had to do what they've had to work an extra job or two or sometimes three if you count summer jobs, just to afford to continue teaching our children.

Hari: What are we talking about, driving Uber?

Alexandra: Yes, actually, there is a teacher I spoke with in Texas that is petrified that at some point he will accidentally be called to pick up one of his students because he doesn't want them to know.

We were working retail, farming, dog walking, tutoring, a lot of waitressing, bartending, selling blood -- anything they can do to continue to afford to fulfill a role that is arguably society's most important role.

Hari: Tell me about the three teachers you followed for the year.

How did you pick them and what kind of positions are they in?

Alexandra: I followed Penny, who is a middle school math teacher in the South, Miguel, a special ed teacher out West, and Rebecca, an East Coast teacher.

So people can see behind the scenes and learn what school is like from the inside.

I chose them because their stories are both relatable and interesting and because I thought people would love them as main characters and enjoy the read with them.

Hari: What was fascinating to me is some of the parents during the kind of open house, one of them had a sense of entitlement that I am not going to bring or pay you anything for school supplies because guess what, I pay my taxes, I pay your salary and you should be doing that.

Give us an idea of how much or how often teachers are going into their own pockets to make the school system whole?

Alexandra: 94% of teachers pay out of their own pockets for classroom supplies.

They pay an average of $500.

Penny one year paid $2000 of her own money because there were so much she needed for her math classroom.

Districts are not giving teachers what they need to supply classrooms.

Hari: One of the things you illustrate so clearly is the amount of time teachers spend that the rest of us non-teachers might think is free time but really isn't, from the summer to even a single day.

Alexandra: Yeah, first of all, teachers aren't paid during the summer which is why so many of them take a summer job to make ends meet.

However they are still doing teaching activities during the summer, whether they are doing continuing education to retain their certificate, professional development, prepping lessons for the following year.

Districts tend to change curriculum often.

If a teacher is involuntarily transferred to a new grade or subject, they have a lot to catch up on.

That is just summer.

During the year, teachers work so much more often than people realize.

The job is impossible to handle during a school day.

Teachers maybe have 150 minute prep time/planning time, and maybe a 20 or 30 minute lunch.

That is not enough time to grade, prep, doing all of the parent calls that administrators put on their shoulders -- it is too much.

Middle and high school teachers can have 180 students easily.

I talked to a teacher in Utah, a Haeckel English teacher, who had 263 students.

-- an English teacher, who had 263 students.

Can you imagine correcting that many assignments?

Hari: The special ed teacher your profiling, whose name you use as my gal, what is interesting to me is how overwhelmingly taxed his schedule seems, how many different types of classes he was teaching.

Just reading it they've me stress and exhaustion -- gave me stress and exhaustion.

He's also facing burnout and a change of heart for this profession.

Alexandra: That's one thing I followed his story through during the year.

The beginning of the year he was thinking he could not take it anymore, so we followed him to see what happens.

But the phrase teacher burnout, it's so popular that Merriam-Webster dictionary provides textual examples for burnout and both of them are about teachers.

But it is misused.

Experts say it's unmanageable workload, pressure at work, not enough resources.

Instead of actually fixing these issues like any normal workplace you would think would do, schools instead tell teacher to relax, do a better job of self-care -- that's a common buzzword among districts -- as if the burden is on the teachers to pay for a massage or something to alleviate the stress caused by a job that is impossible to do.

I think instead of saying teacher burnout, we need to come up with something else.

Teacher demoralization may be.

The burnout is not on the teachers, it is not their fault.

Instead of saying teachers have the highest levels of burnout, we need to say school systems are the employer's and they are worse at supplying employees.

Hari: Also substitute teachers, which I didn't think about, because the market I assumed goes up and down when there are shortages.

You became one and that turned into a longer-term engagement.

Alexandra: I wasn't expecting that.

A couple of days before the August open house last year, a school was allotted a new class but had no teacher.

I had short-term subbed at that school before and so they asked me to fill it and so I did.

I was a full-time third grade teacher for that semester.

First of all, I loved it.

Substitute teaching for me was a gift, I loved being with the students, I left earning what it was like to connect with students and see their exhilaration when a science project works or they finally understand a math concept.

I can tell you why there are not so many substitute teachers.

Last school year, I worked in school subbing more than 150 days out of 180.

My paycheck for the entire year, including retention bonuses and the Covid sub raise, my paycheck for the entire year, including a fulsome master as a full-time teacher, was just over $6,000 with no other benefits.

That's a problem.

An administrator told teachers last year near where I live, it is really hard to find long-term subs, so I need you to not get sick or pregnant this year.

The problem is that if a district cannot find enough substitutes, the fault lies with the district for not making the job doable.

Hari: How much of the stress on teachers right now is coming from an increasingly political climate of what is taught in the classroom and how, depending on the community, how mobilized parents are to get involved?

On the one hand, every child succeeds if their parent is involved.

We know that is true.

But the ways that parents are now attacking school boards and districts about curriculum seems very different.

You would want all of those parents engaged but maybe not in this way.

Alexandra: Yeah.

Educators are the only skilled professionals trained and certified to develop and deliver age-appropriate lessons to students paired not -- students.

Not parents who think they know about schools because they went to school, and not politicians who have never taught in a public school classroom.

There is a line between involved and overinvolved.

Many of the teachers leaving classrooms today are not leaving because of students, they tell me over and over again that it is hard to leave teaching because you love your students.

Teachers all over the country told me they are tired of the adults.

Hari: Is there an increasing amount of politics coming into the classroom?

Alexandra: Yeah, we are seeing a dangerous step nationally that we've seen in some states leads to politicians and parents pushing to remove from schools books, school materials, and discussions involving race, LGBTQ identities, and racism in American history.

Republicans are pushing these prejudicial measures under the banner of parents rights, but which parents?

Their message is exclusion and a country and cater to a small fringe of parents.

Every child deserves to feel safe, comfortable and represented at school, in the classroom, in the bathroom, and in important sometimes lifesaving conversations with adults like teachers and guidance counselors.

Hari: If there are these forces at play here, whether it is a push to privatize, whether it is called increase of parental rights, or the decrease in teacher salaries, what is the net cost to a generation of students?

Alexandra: Their education will tank if we don't have enough teachers in the classrooms.

I think people are starting to see that.

A lot of long-term subs, if schools can manage to get them in the classroom -- some classes are empty.

Penny had to double upper class often.

The teacher in the South I followed for the book, she often had to combine other classes with her own because the classes didn't have enough coverage.

We will see more of that if we don't turn this ship around quickly.

Hari: One of the things I hope people realize is the general racial composition of what public education is in America today.

I wonder how you see this conversation about how to educate students about race and culture in America.

Because you have a lot of parents saying I don't want you to make my child feel ashamed for something that their ancestors might have participated in.

At the same time, you look at the composition of the classroom , shouldn't the children who are living in America today also have an understanding of what happened in the past?

Alexandra: Of course.

Every child should feel represented in the classroom.

How are we going to stop bigotry if children don't learn what it is?

How will we promote inclusion if students don't learn that not every family looks like there's?

The majority of public school students in the country are students of color and we need to make sure they feel like they are getting the same education as everybody else, like their history is presented and their culture represented.

Hari: What is the fix?

Is there a correlation between paying more for teachers and student outcomes?

There is so much of our system that is trying to be designed toward outcomes.

Based on the research and what is working, and the teachers you've spoken with, what works?

Alexandra: Test scores in math and English raise significantly in districts that give teachers higher base salaries.

There is a clear correlation.

So yes, number one, pay.

Even more than that, the majority of parents in this country do not want the culture wars in their schools.

Want everybody to be taught history as it happened.

It is a small subset of parents and politicians who happen to be very loud.

Now is the time that those of us who are educator allies need to stand up for teachers, speak up for them, and show up to board meetings to lobby for what they need.

Hari: A lot of challenges were facing the education system before the pandemic.

What happened that fired up so many parents in the culture wars and added these new stresses and what is the long-term consequence?

Alexandra: OK, so, to get a little into the politics, parents became upset -- they said schools were closed.

They were not closed, they were open, they were just virtual in some cases.

I want to say, teachers wanted to be in person too, but only if it was safe.

Before vaccines and before we knew anything about COVID, nobody knew if it was safe to be in school.

However, teachers ended up working longer days of to transfer lessons to virtual materials and online platforms than they would have had they been in school.

With that said, parents who were upset their children were in their own house instead of a building started being vocal.

They started being vocal about masks.

Glenn Youngkin used parents rights as the central part of his campaign in Virginia.

When Republicans saw his campaign worked, I think they started jumping on the bandwagon.

In the first part of I believe it was 2022, there were more than 100 bills proposed just in the first six weeks of the year to start meddling in schools and censoring discussions and have more parental control over items that may involve race or LGBTQ identities paid I think -- identities.

I think Republicans pounced on this as something that might work in their campaigns.

They galvanized parents by weaponizing the term CRT.

Critical race theory is not taught in K-12 schools but Republicans darted using it as a way to refer to any oppression or talk of racism in American history.

They use this umbrella term to rile up parents and it worked.

Those parents are now fighting for something that actually is not going to help students.

However, if you look at the surveys, most parents of school-age children do not want the culture wars in their schools.

In fact, the people who are more likely to say they are upset with their local schools are parents who don't have school aged children.

This has become a political thing rather than an education thing.

Hari: The book is called "the teachers."

Alexandra Robbins, thank you for joining us.

Alexandra: Thank you for having me.

Christiane: Finally, tears of joy as months of separation come to an end.

31 Ukrainian children are back in the arms of their parents and siblings and other family members more than six months after being sent to Russia.

The International Criminal Court has indicted President Putin and a key minister for illegally deporting Ukrainian children from areas under Russian occupation.

Kyiv believes tens of thousands have been kidnapped, Russia denies wrongdoing.

Here is the moment one Ukrainian mother holds her 13-year-old son in her arms again for the first time since they were separated.

A group of these mothers have embarked on several perilous journeys to find their children and bring them home, assisted by the save Ukraine organization, which is determined to make this happen for more families and to deliver more scenes of jubilation in this cruel war.

That's it for our program.

If you want to find out what is coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter.

Thank you for watching.

Join us again tomorrow night.

♪