Yesterday, I went to Trader Joe’s to do my groceries and, while looking at the flower section (I killed my last houseplant and needed a replacement), noticed that the orchids had a sign above them: “Perfect for Teacher Appreciation Week!” It runs May 4th through May 8th this year.
Flowers for teachers, as for dates, are never a bad call. Often, schools and Parent Teacher Associations do breakfasts for teachers, and students write cards about how much their teachers mean to them.
But what these tokens of gratitude—and Teacher Appreciation Week more broadly—signify is far greater than the items themselves, and point to what teachers yearn for most in their work year-round: dignity.
Indeed, in far too many places around the country, teaching has sky-high attrition rates. IW Features has spoken with many teachers who have left public school classrooms. Take Paula Edwards in New Mexico, who transitioned to a coaching role after a 2nd grader who hadn’t been potty trained was allegedly able to get away with smearing feces on his classmates. Or Michelle Mangiapane in Michigan, who was faced with discriminatory (and mandatory) DEI trainings that insinuated she was less effective a teacher because of her “level of whiteness.”
The teaching crisis begins before many would-be teachers are even able to enter the classroom. Carly Knight in South Dakota, a freshman in college, told IW Features she was concerned by state-mandated textbooks encouraging students of education to vote for liberal politicians and aid and abet the gender transition of minors. She has committed to entering the profession anyway, but nearly left her program because she was horrified by what she was being taught.
At the core of each of these stories is a fundamental indignity. Teachers are not allowed to exercise their consciences on massive questions like transitioning children, and students with behavioral issues are often allowed to run roughshod over their teachers.
Teachers are also often subject to useless layers of bureaucracy, including DEI trainings like the one Mangiapane suffered, as well as infantilizing time wasters. As one teacher told Ed Week, “[T]eachers are the only [professionals who attend] a meeting/conference/professional development and are treated like children.”
But many of those who understand this problem think that the solution is to throw more money at it. This is nonsense.
Putting aside the fact that we are already spending more on schools than ever before, while getting no results (if anything, education has gotten worse as we have spent more on it), the research suggests that increasing teacher pay doesn’t increase retention. Academics Doug Larkin and Suzanne Poole Patzelt, per a Harvard Graduate School of Education podcast, “set out to study the link between teacher pay and retention. Drawing on a six-year study across 13 districts and four states, they identified 10 factors that influence retention. Supportive relationships and system level support came out on top. They described strong schools as ecosystems built on trust, low isolation, shared resources, and leadership that supports teachers instead of policing them.”
That doesn’t mean increasing teacher pay is inherently bad, but rather that increasing teacher pay is less important to teachers than feeling respected.
The state of Louisiana has been ahead of the curve on this. Its “Let Teachers Teach” initiative was spearheaded by Superintendent Cade Brumley with the tagline: “Cutting through bureaucracy so teachers can focus on what matters most – teaching students.”
“More than two dozen teachers from across Louisiana came together to form the Let Teachers Teach workgroup,” says the initiative’s website. “They identified the biggest disruptions in their day-to-day work—from excessive training and paperwork to classroom discipline issues—and developed a set of practical, common-sense recommendations.”
Let Teachers Teach was only launched in 2024 and is currently being codified by the state, so results will take time. But the fact that a state approached the teaching profession’s crisis by turning to teachers themselves—not union bosses, academics, or bureaucrats—is incredibly promising.
Since education was designed at this country’s very founding to be a local issue, other states and even localities can follow in Louisiana’s footsteps and run such initiatives of their own.
At the end of the day, teacher appreciation can’t end at Teacher Appreciation Week. The annual celebration shouldn’t be an excuse to limit our gratitude for America’s teachers, but rather for states and localities to take actionable steps to help the teaching profession attract and retain talented people—because ultimately the better off American teachers are, the better off American students will be.
