Louis V. Gerstner Jr. Quotes

I'm committed to working with teachers.

When we become a really mature, grown-up, wise society, we will put teachers at the center of the community, where they belong. We don't honor them enough, we don't pay them enough.

The main thing I am interested in is my experience as a teacher.

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

I think teaching should be a vocation, and they should be paid more for it.

More than half of my former students teach - elementary and high school, community college and university. I taught them to be passionate about literature and writing, and to attempt to translate that passion to their own students. They are rookie teachers, most likely to be laid off and not rehired, even though they are passionate.

The most experienced teachers are frequently promoted right out of the classroom!

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 don't look at teachers as scholars the way they do in Europe. In Spain you're called a professor if you're a high school teacher, and they pay teachers - they pay teachers in Europe.

Teaching is hard. It takes a lot of skill. Not everyone who tries can do it well. We need to admit that and act accordingly. We should reward and respect great teachers by paying them more, and we should stop rewarding seniority over effectiveness.

Both of my sisters have been teachers and they used to say you get asked between 300 and 600 questions every day which you have to answer. That's exactly what directing is. And the vast majority of those questions are not very interesting really, but they need somebody to make a decision - a good one or a bad one - and they follow it.

My time at the Denver Public Schools taught me there is no harder, or more important, job than being a teacher.

Teachers have the hardest and most important jobs in America. They're building our nation. And we should appreciate them, respect them, and pay them well.

Teachers are not glorified babysitters with summers off. Their profession fuels all others, and on a normal day that is amazing enough in and of itself.

I think good teachers are underpaid.

Teaching is the only major occupation of man for which we have not yet developed tools that make an average person capable of competence and performance. In teaching we rely on the 'naturals', the ones who somehow know how to teach.

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.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

I loved teaching. I used to teach fourth grade.

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

Teacher compensation isn't the only factor in cultivating great teaching. Other important priorities include changing how we measure student performance, providing more flexibility to teacher-preparation programs, and improving how we train and support principals.

The office of the public teacher is an unenviable and thankless one.

The United States is the only civilized country in the world to class its teachers at the bottom of the social scale.

Teachers need to be paid like professionals.

Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.