“American Teacher” Screening at Sammamish Library

Microsoft Partners in Learning, The Teacher Salary Project and community volunteers have collaborated to host public screenings of this film all over the country. This documentary, based on the New York Times bestselling book Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers premiered recently at NBC Education Nation. It chronicles the hard-hitting, first-person accounts of four teachers - and the challenges they struggle to overcome inside and outside the classroom. The film tells the deeper story of the teaching profession in America today.

In the next ten years, more than half of this country’s current 3.2 million teachers will be eligible to retire. We will then have a choice: continue with the current broken system of trying to attract talented college graduates to the teaching profession by offering – long hours, little support, low pay—a system that results in high turnover and translates into 85 percent of graduates refusing to even consider the profession. Or we change: improve conditions to attract the best college graduates who might otherwise go into law, finance, or other lucrative fields. With the best and the brightest in the profession, our schools will get better.

Please take the first step by attending the screening of this film and learning what you can do to make this change happen.