John Podesta Quotes

We need to make sure teachers are in schools and that children have teachers.

I am deeply concerned with the diminution of the teaching strength of the country as a result of the disproportionately low salaries that are paid to teachers throughout the country.

We need to reward the 'thankless job' of substitute teaching with better pay and chances for permanent positions. I look forward to the day when no student comes home saying, 'I didn't learn much today... we had a sub.'

As a Member of Congress from one of the fastest growing States in the country, we hire close to 2,500 new teachers a year, close to 5,000 support staff and faculty.

If we freed up all the money in the certification process, think about how much more money we'd have to put into teacher salaries.

Why don't we have enough teachers of math and science in the public schools? One answer is well, if they knew the subject well, they'd also know enough to work for Google or Goldman Sachs or God knows where.

We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher's salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.

The impending teacher shortage is the most critical education issue we will face in the next decade.

Teachers make a difference, and we would serve our students better by focusing on attracting and retaining the quality teachers by raising teacher pay.

There is a shortage of teachers but the January 2001 schools census showed that teacher numbers were at their highest level than at any time since 1984 - and 11,000 higher than 1997.

… while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

We are having trouble finding teachers to teach STEM. We also need to make sure schools have the resources. Some communities have multiple computers for each student in their schools. Other schools don't have textbooks, let alone computers.

As a former teacher, it pains me to watch such an essential and rewarding profession suffer due to government neglect.

The teacher crisis is something we are really worried about during the byelection in Mount Albert. I counted, across a month, seven teachers I identified just in my area who were all leaving - not the profession but Auckland.

Ensuring all kids have access to an effective, talented teacher needs to be a national priority.

I do recognise that, where recruitment difficulties persist, teachers can be put under great pressure.

Without any doubt at all, teacher quality is the fundamental differentiator. Not just, incidentally, of education, but I would argue, probably the biggest single differentiator of success for the nations of the 21st Century.

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

There is no education system in the world - none at all - that's better than its average teacher.

If teaching isn't rewarding and challenging, we're going to continue to lose our best teachers to work in other fields.

It is vital that teachers can be paid more without having to leave the classroom. This will be particularly important to schools in the most disadvantaged areas as it will empower them to attract and recruit the best teachers.

Barack Obama wants teacher service scholarships.

We have seen that, in another unfunded mandate, the so-called No Child Left Behind Act, which created tougher standards, and we all support that, but Congress did not provide the money to attract and hire the best teachers.

Few things are more important to our country's future than recruiting and keeping great teachers in our schools.